Twitter's latest buy: Big data startup Lucky Sort
The social-networking giant is likely hoping the startup can help it better understand how to monetize the billions of tweets that run through its system every year.
Twitter's shopping spree shows no signs of letting up. Today, the social-networking giant said that it has acquired big data startup Lucky Sort.
Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said in a blog post that his company's "goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize, and visualize by building elegant and user-friendly tools for text analysis."
Neither Twitter nor Lucky Sort said precisely how the startup will be integrated into Twitter's larger plans, but Pepper said in his post that several members of his team would be moving to San Francisco to become part of Twitter's revenue engineering department.
Clearly, though, Twitter's bottom line is bolstered by its ability to understand what its users do, and as a result, to better target advertising at them. Since Pepper wrote that "we'll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter," it appears that he and his team will be spending their time giving Twitter a better vision of what's really going on with the billions of tweets that are generated every year.
But the move might also be meant to build new tools that allow Twitter users -- such as big advertisers -- to get better insight into how their customers are utilizing the social network. In a tweet today, Twitter's senior director of Product for Revenue, Kevin Weil, noted, "Really excited to join forces with the [Lucky Sort] team. Self-serve analytics [for the win]."
In recent months, Twitter has bought a number of companies that seem to fill holes in its portfolio. Among them are We Are Hunted, which built its new Twitter Music app, social TV analytics startup Bluefin Labs, and crash reporting service Crashlytics.