Twitter Acquires Gnip, Bringing a Valuable Data Service In

Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press

Added the announcement of Twitter's new vice president of consumer product.

Twitter on Tuesday announced that it had acquired Gnip, a company that provides data about activity on the social network as it is occurring.

The eight-year-old company is the latest in a series of data companies acquired by Twitter as the micro-messaging service improves its ability to provide information about its users' behavior to potential sponsors, advertisers and others who analyze the service.

In 2010, Gnip was the first company to work with Twitter to gain access to the social network's so-called fire hose, which contains all publicly available tweets since 2006. Brands, advertisers and, recently, academics could use that stream of data to analyze and parse activity on the social network.

That is proving to be an increasingly lucrative business. In December, Twitter had 241 million monthly active users worldwide, and last year the company generated more than $70 million in revenue from licensing its data.

'We have had customers tell us individual tweets can be worth $1 million at times,' Chris Moody, chief executive of Gnip, said in an interview earlier this year.

The move to acquire Gnip, based in Boulder, Colo., can be seen as a preventive measure, bringing in-house a valuable service that Twitter four years ago was unable to prioritize, before someone else can snatch the company.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Last year, Apple acquired Topsy Labs, a similar provider of data of Twitter activity. The terms of that deal were also not disclosed, though The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, estimated the deal to be worth more than $200 million.

'We believe Gnip has only begun to scratch the surface,' Jana Messerschmidt, Twitter's vice president of global business development and platform, wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. '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.'

While Gnip has been one of the few companies that had access to Twitter's complete fire hose of tweets, and has worked with competing social services like Tumblr and Foursquare, the company does little by way of analytical capabilities. Twitter has no immediate plans to build analytical capabilities using Gnip's services.

Rather, with this acquisition, Twitter is looking to cut out the middleman. That, ultimately, will give it more control and understanding about how the data of its millions of users are being used.

On Tuesday, Daniel Graf, most recently Google's director of maps, also announced that he was joining Twitter as its vice president of consumer product. Mr. Graf takes over for Michael Sippey, who left in January - the first high-level departure from the social network company since it went public in November.

Followed Maps to find that the flock was just around the corner - excited to take wing with the @twitter product team...

- Daniel Graf (@danielgraf) 15 Apr 14

Mr. Sippey's departure came as Twitter faced big questions about whether and how to change its user interface to make the service easier to use. Last week, the service began the rollout of a new look for its profile pages that is meant to highlight each user's best tweets.