11 June 2010 | Author: J. Morton News Editor

Twitter acquires Smallthought Systems

Twitter announced Thursday it has acquired a group known as Smallthought Systems a start up responsible for Trendly, an application that lets web sites find out more about the usage and traffic data that is collected by Google Analytics.

The popular microblogging web site, which also recently announced it would integrate advertising with searches through its Promoted Tweets, plans to use existing Smallthought employees as part of the web site's analytics team.

The new employees "have joined our analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners," according to a post by Kevin Weil on the official Twitter Blog.

The company required extra staff and resources to maintain the overflowing amount of information the Twitter web site handles each day, according to CEO Dick Costello. The service currently receives more than 65 million updates every day from its users, whose numbers fall near 200 million.

"Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service," the company said in the posting.

The staff from Smallthought and Trendly will also be working on new tools and products to offer for Twitter partners in the future as well.

This acquisition is just the most recent of Twitter's growing list of technology assets. In 2009, the company acquired Mixer Labs, a location-based firm laying claim to GeoAPI, which provides geolocation services for many different online clients. This spring, they also came to an agreement over Atebits, the creator of the popular iPhone Twitter client Tweetie, for its purchase.

Home | Careers | RSS | Contact Us | Newsletter

International sites: