New York — Popular micro-blogging outfit Twitter, lately seems to have been bulging up its arsenal with a small startup called Bagcheck, an online service where people create lists of items that interest them, the company announced in a blog post on Monday.
Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed nor a timeframe as to when the agreement should be completed, and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bagcheck, launched just seven months ago, encourages members to build lists of things that interest you across diversified collection of products, applications and items they love by placing them into “bags,” such as cameras they have used or their favorite cold remedies, and share the lists with others.
However, Bagcheck’s service will remain functional, at least for now, but “as with any acquisition, things may change at some point in the future,” Bagcheck said in a blog post.
Bagcheck’s other co-founder, Luke Wroblewski, who was also previously employed at Yahoo, has left the company to work on “the next big thing,” and describes it as “a fun way to build and share lists of the things you are passionate about using on your computer, in your kitchen, for photography, when parenting, and everything in between.”
“We have acquired Bagcheck, and Sam Pullara, its co-founder and CTO will join us today,” a Twitter spokesperson informed Mashable.
Furthermore, the acquisition of Bagcheck appears to be mostly triggered by a decision to snatch up the engineering half of the two-man co-founder team. It was also announced today that Bagcheck co-founder Sam Pullara will join Twitter’s engineering team. Before Bagcheck, Pullara worked on projects like Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Query Language, and Yahoo Search BOSS as Yahoo’s head of product API.
“Sam Pullara is a rare talent with a deep appreciation for connecting people with their interests,” Twitter’s representative says. “He is a talented product strategist, technologist and entrepreneur who has not only led large teams at Yahoo and Borland, but has co-founded successful ventures and spent time advising young startups as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital.”
ReadWriteWeb opines that Twitter landing Pullara is perhaps the most important part of the acquisition.
“If Sam Pullara can advance the kind of example represented by Yahoo Pipes and YQL into the Twitter ecosystem, that would drop the already low technical cost of entry and greatly increase the power available to Twitter’s ecosystem of developers,” the blog said.
One of Bagcheck’s paramount achievements, says Wroblewski, was rolling out a number of real-time user interface elements. These elements — such as real-time notifications and an as-it-happens view of who’s checking out your “bag” — perhaps speak to Twitter’s real interest in the young company.
However, it is still not clear as to how Twitter will use Bagcheck in the future. At the heart of things, Bagcheck comes down to searching for and sharing for things people like. Yet, its likely that the acquisition is another step toward creating a homegrown advertising and promotion platform for Twitter. This is the latest in a slew of acquisitions by Twitter in the last year, which also include BackType and AdGrok.
For now the service will remain available to users but that could change, according to Bagcheck. The start up has created an instant export feature that will wrap all the “bags” made by users into a tidy set of HTML and JSON files.