New York — Twitter is on a shopping spree, and it seems that the popular micro-blogging outfit will soon be offering more services to publishers using the messaging service, as yesterday it announced that it has acquired social media analytics startup BackType, according to a blog post published by BackType today.
The acquisition, announced on the company blog today, describes two essentially befitting trends at Twitter. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed in the post.
First, Twitter is positively moving ahead to collect under its direct control features that had been offered by third parties. Additionally, the micro-blogging outfit recently acquired the popular Twitter client app Tweetdeck. It also recently added picture sharing to its feature set. These initiatives make it less necessary for Twitter users to go to third-party services to do what they want to do with, or on, Twitter.
“We will be brining out team and technology to Twitter’s platform team, where our focus will be on developing tools for Twitter’s publishing partners,” BackType wrote in a blog post.
Second, is this move emphasizes the increasing value of measuring social media influence. BackType’s premier service that include BackTweets, which helps companies in understanding the importance of their 140-character messages. The service helps publishers and other businesses see who’s tweeting about them and whether those tweets translate into website visits. This type of information is money-making for a social media company like Twitter. Marketers want to know who in a social sphere, be it Twitter, Facebook, or another service, is important to them.
The startup, whose investors include True Ventures and incubator Y Combinator, says that its team will be joining Twitter to develop new publisher tools. Clients have included companies like AOL and Microsoft. The company was also working on a project called Storm, a data-processing tool BackType calls the “Hadoop of realtime processing.”
“Joining Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring awareness to tens of millions of publishers around the world that are using Twitter to communicate and connect with their audience,” the blog post continued. “We are also thrilled to bring our technology (especially Storm) to Twitter where it can have a big impact across the company.”
San Francisco-based BackType is closing its products to new clients, but it will be free for existing customers. Other products will be discontinued, and BackType says that its technology will be incorporated into Twitter — particularly Storm, its system for processing the Twitter stream in real-time.
According to a popular tech blog AllThingsD, which quoted Twitter’s director of platform Ryan Sarver as saying: “BackType’s two founders Christopher Golda and Michael Motano were among the first to mine Twitter firehose data to assist some of the world’s biggest publishers understand the impact of their tweet. The BackType team will bring this technology and expertise to Twitter to help Web publishers get the most our of the platform.”
The move might seem like another instance where startups who develop services on top of Twitter are now competing with the platform company. Thus back in March, Sarver wrote that if developers do not want to compete with Twitter, they are better off focusing on publisher tools and other backend services, rather than apps for consumers. So startups who followed those instructions and focused on analytics tools might now feel a little miffed.
Moreover, as Twitter presents more services for publishers, should startups selling their own publisher tools (like Sulia) or other analytics products (like Klout) be worried? Sarver said via email that there is still a lot of opportunity here for companies besides Twitter: “With 200 million Tweets a day, the market demand for Twitter insight is high.”
Furthermore, BackType is one of the many companies acquired by the micro-blogging social media network to help build an advertising platform. In June, Twitter bought advertising platform AdGrok and a month prior to that it purchased TweetDeck.
Established in 2008, BackType’s client base comprises of more than 100 prominent companies, including The New York Times, AOL, Microsoft, Bitly, HubSpot and SlideShare. The BackType team will move to Twitter’s San Francisco offices. Beyond that, the specifics of how Twitter will use BackType have not been revealed and the terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Nevertheless, there has been rumors swirling in the past that Twitter would eventually build its own analytics tool. The BackType acquisition could mean there is some truth to that rumor.