Twitter Buys Social Data Company 'Gnip'

Twitter announced Tuesday that it has bought the social data company Gnip. This means that the social site will now be directly selling its data to third-party businesses, such as advertisement companies, to make their data even more easily available.

"We want to make our data even more accessible, and the best way to do that is to work directly with our customers to get a better understanding of their needs," said Twitter in a blog post. "To that end, we have agreed to acquire Gnip."

"Public tweets can reveal a wide variety of insights -- so much so that academic institutions, journalists, marketers, brands, politicians and developers regularly use aggregated Twitter data to spot trends, analyze sentiment, find breaking news, connect with customers and much more," the social site added.

Through the acquisition, Gnip will be able to give out more informative data collection and enhanced data enrichments to many developers and other interested companies around the globe. This means added targeted ads for every Internet user, Engadget reported.

This strategy was believed to be a part of Twitter's initiative to adding 15 new types of ads, which will mostly be mobile, said Alex Roetter, Twitter's VP for engineering and revenue to VentureBeat.

Gnip is a social media API aggregation company that packages and sells data collected from Twitter to third-party companies for the past four years. It is one of the few social data companies that have access to the social site's pool of data dating back to 2006.

Other social data companies like Topsy, which was bought by Apple in 2013, and the San Francisco, Calif.-based Datasift will still work with Twitter, while Gnips can still work with other social media companies like Facebook, Flickr, and Google Buzz. However, many believe that this current set-up will not last long as there are many conflicts of interests.

Real Time Analytics