Twitter analytics platform BackType announced Tuesday that it has been acquired by Twitter. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Here’s the company’s official statement:
Our vision at BackType has always been to help our customers understand the value of engagement on Twitter and other social platforms. We also created BackTweets to help publishers understand the reach of their tweets and content, who they are reaching, and how Tweets covert to web traffic, sales and other KPIs.
Joining Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring insight to tens of millions of publishers around the world that are using Twitter to communicate and connect with their audience. We’re also excited to bring our technology (especially Storm) to Twitter where it can have a big impact across the company.
While today’s Twitter acquisition is a lot less high-profile than the last–an estimated $50 million purchase of TweetDeck–it is no less important to the company.
More than ever before, real-time analysis of the Twitter stream is a hefty and significant task. Last week, Twitter revealed that users are now sending out 200 million tweets per day. A year ago, there were 65 million tweets going out per day. In January 2009, just two million.
To date, BackType has analyzed 50 billion tweets, 10 billion links and 200 million accounts.
Most recently, the company was working on a stream processing system called Storm, which they were calling the “Hadoop of realtime processing.” On a fast-paced microblogging site like Twitter, the chief value is in the most up-to-the-minute posts. While the site is often compared to Facebook for its social element, the truth is that Twitter is best seen as an information network, with outlets in users all around the globe.
Current BackType users can (for now) still use the service for free, but the company will no longer accept new registrants. As time goes on, products and API services will be discontinued.
The four-person BackType team will be joining Twitter at its headquarters in San Francisco, Calif.
Since its founding in 2008, BackType had raised a little over $1 million from Y Combinator, True Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Manu Kumar, Chris Sacca, Raymond Tonsing and Seth Berman.
