Twitter on Tuesday announced that it has acquired Colorado based social data provider start-up Gnip, with which it has been working closely for years. The company is yet to disclose the financial details of the deal.
The micro-blogging site’s latest move indicates that it is keen in entering into packaging and selling data service that is currently in demand by both business and government entities.
“Gnip has played a crucial role in collecting and digesting our public data and delivering the most essential Tweets to partners,” said Jana Messerschmidt, Twitter’s VP of business development and platform.
“We believe Gnip has only begun to scratch the surface. Together we plan to offer more sophisticated data sets and better data enrichments, so that even more developers and businesses big and small around the world can drive innovation using the unique content that is shared on Twitter.”
Gnip CEO, Chris Moody, announcing the acquisition said “We’ll be able to support a broader set of use cases across a diverse set of users including brands, universities, agencies, and developers big and small.”
“Joining Twitter also provides us access to resources and infrastructure to scale to the next level and offer new products and solutions.”
Gnip, which was launched in 2008, served as the first official data partner for tech giants including Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, WordPress, Reddit, Instagram, Google+, Facebook, and YouTube.
The data provider firm which has access to the full “firehose” of data from various social networks; first collects content from them, shrinks it down to company-specific sets and then sends the data to organizations all around the globe.
The news of acquisition was welcomed by the investors which resulted in Twitter’s stock price rising up more than 11 percent, the biggest gain since the day it went public in November.
In addition to the acquisition, Twitter also announced that it has hired Daniel Graf, a Google executive to lead its consumer product development, the position that had been vacant since January.
