Twitter has bought long-time partner and social data provider Gnip, as the social network looks to boost its targeting abilities for advertisers.
The newly listed social network announced the news on its blog on Tuesday, saying that the move will help it provide “more sophisticated data sets and better data enrichments” for use by developers and businesses.
The deal lets Twitter use Gnip data to enhance its appeal to brands and companies to satisfy shareholders.
Gnip was founded in 2008 and was Twitter’s first data-collection partner. The company’s service collects public tweets from the social network’s users, compiles them into digestible data sets, and serves them to companies and organizations around the globe.
In some cases, that data is used for research, while in others, it’s the backbone of an ad strategy. Gnip claims to have processed 2.3 trillion tweets since its founding.
In addition to Twitter, Gnip analyzes data from a host of other sources, including Foursquare and Tumblr. It’s not clear whether data collection on those services will continue.
Gnip would say only in a blog post announcing the deal that it plans to deliver “new offerings with Twitter.”
http://blog.gnip.com/
https://blog.twitter.com/2014/twitter-welcomes-gnip-to-the-flock