Twitter Acquires Gnip, the World’s Leading Provider of Social Data

Twitter has just announced that it has acquired Gnip, the world’s leading provider of social data. The announcement was made by Jana Messerschmidt, VP of Global Business Development.

“Every day Twitter users share and discuss their interests and what’s happening in the world. These public Tweets can reveal a wide variety of insights—so much so that academic institutions, journalists, marketers, brands, politicians and developers regularly use aggregated Twitter data to spot trends, analyze sentiment, find breaking news, connect with customers and much more,” states Messerschmidt.

Gnip is a social data provider that offers access to complete real time streams of public data from the leading social networks like Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, and Foursquare. Additionally, Gnip offers its clients access to historical Twitter data as well as Twitter’s Firehose. Firehose is the nickname given to the entire stream of tweets flowing through Twitter, and recent estimates state that Twitter now delivers roughly 500 million tweets each day. The financial terms of this acquisition were kept confidential.

Messerschmidt acknowledged that Gnip plays a crucial role in collecting and digesting Twitter’s public data, which is delivered together with Gnip’s enrichments to partners.

“We believe Gnip has only begun to scratch the surface. 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. We will continue making our data available to Gnip’s growing customer base. And with the help of Gnip’s Boulder-based team, we will be extending our data platform—through Gnip and our existing public APIs—even further,” stated Messerschmidt.

Gnip has also released its own statement about the acquisition on its blog. In the blog post, Chris Moody recounts how Gnip has managed to deliver more than 2.3 trillion tweets to customers in more than 42 countries. These aggregated tweets are used to provide much needed insight into numerous industries, such as business intelligence, finance, marketing, professional services, and public relations.

Many analysts see this acquisition as a sign that Twitter wants to play a bigger role in social data analysis, which is needed by businesses that require insights from social media. Aside from leveraging social data, Twitter is on another equally important mission: attracting new users to its service.

In the coming months, Twitter is planning to roll out new features that are designed to make its micro-blogging service more appealing to netizens. User growth has slowed down in the last couple of years and its shares have fallen recently.

For the time being, it will be business as usual for Gnip, and the company will continue to make Firehose available to its customers. Gnip will continue to provide online marketers and agencies user-generated data from Twitter, which can then be analyzed to uncover sentiment about brands. User-generated data can also be used for social media monitoring, specifically for reputation management and competition analysis, and to uncover consumer and industry trends.

Do you think Twitter’s acquisition of Gnip will affect the latter’s ability to deliver aggregated Twitter data to online marketers? You may post replies in the Comments section or make a reply-blog post.

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