Twitter Acquires Social Data Provider Gnip

A lot of rapid updates are taking place within the Twitter community and the latest to join this list is its acquisition of social data provider Gnip which means that the networking giant would themselves take on the task of packaging and selling data which is in great demand in government and private sectors.

It also went to add that they have hired a Google executive for its consumer production development position which was left vacant since January. This news brought about a good news for the investors as Twitter shares went up by 11% which is the biggest gain since the day it went public in November.

In a recent blog, Twitter mentioned that this deal would give them a direct access to the 500 million tweets which forms the data traffic on its network. Previously, third-party firms like Gnip, Datasift and Dataminr bought access to the tweets which they re-sold to their corporate clients. Twitter Vice President Jana Messerschmidt said that public tweets reveal a lot of insights to such an extent that academic institutions, journalists, marketers, brands, politicians and journalists use Twitter data to analyze trends, sentiments, breaking news and much more on a daily basis.

A 250-million strong Twitter user base has allowed the growth of independent analytics outfits who are able to provide tips to traders regarding stock news, inform television producers about the viewers sentiment and alert government agencies to disasters in remote locations.

An interesting statement comes from Ryan Server, former direction of platform at Twitter and currently partner at Redpoint Ventures, that this tie-up could lead to a boost in Twitter’s revenue as a majority of clients in finance, media and government are willing to pay for insights from Twitter data. It is not yet known whether this Gnip deal with affect Twitter’s relationship with other Twitter data providers. Gnip also provides data for social media content on sites like Tumblr, WordPress, Reddit, Instagram, and Foursquare.

New Hiring

Twitter has hired Daniel Graf, a Google executive managing the Google Maps app, to head their consumer product team in place of Michael Sippey, who left in January.

Twitter has been trying hard to refresh its core website and mobile apps, which have failed to bring in a large number of users.  They announced in February that their base grew by 4% which was their lowest ever and the timeline views also dropped dramatically. Twitter has been doing a number of changes in order to attract user growth. Lately, they have redefined its user profile page which resembles to that of Facebook.