Los Angeles — On the heels of Twitter rolled out its new in-house URL shortening service, the company in an effort to bolster its data gathering abilities, has been on a shopping spree of late, on Thursday, it announced the acquisition of Smallthought Systems, a four-person startup responsible for building a project management tool Dabble DB and Trendly, two analytics solutions that Twitter used up until a year ago.
Though Twitter does not disclosed many details in its blog post regarding its future plans with Smallthought, it did not say the new team that comes with the acquisition will “focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative real-time products for our future commercial partners.”
Smallthought’s Trendly service analyzes data from the outside of publishers’ sites, taking a look at Google Analytics, and then delivers “true, sensible information,” according to the Next Web.
“Every day millions of people visit Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of enhancing our service,” says Twitter Analytics Lead Kevin Weil.
Twitter used Dabble DB up until last year, when the company “shifted that project management tool in-house””. “When Smallthought launched Trendly, a tool that helps web sites distinguish signal from noise in their Google Analytics data, we were among the first to try it,” says Weil. “And, as Twitter is the world’s largest Ruby on Rails-based web service, we are impressed with their frequent contributions to the Ruby and Smalltalk development communities. Their team has a unique combination of entrepreneurship, creativity, and analytics expertise.”
As with every advertising services, a key element in the success of Promoted Tweets will be Twitter’s capability to assess the popularity and effectiveness of these ads so that campaigns can be evaluated and optimized.
The analytics for Promoted Tweets may be more demanding than for other online advertising programs for a few reasons, including the fact that the ad format for Promoted Tweets will be the same as the format for regular “tweets” and that Twitter’s usage is going through the roof, with 2 billion “tweets” posted in May, according to Web monitoring company Pingdom.
Twitter, which is presently supporting some 65 million tweets a day is obviously preparing itself for its future monetization efforts, to which analytics and URL shortening would be vital to their strategy. The microblogging service is still exploring sustainable business models, and the more businesses rely on its services to understand their customers the better.