TWIMPACT Dev Blog

Twitter acquires Backtype

Twitter recently acquired backtype, a social media analysis company. Backtype provided all kinds of analysis and metrics to help companies analyze their performance on Twitter. With this acquisition, Twitter is continuing to incorporate services and know-how which has so far been provided by third parties. Previous examples were Summize for the real-time search back in 2008, TweetDeck for its Twitter client, and now backtype.

Backtype has been working on a number of projects to bring real-time analysis to a Hadoop cluster, including ElephantDB, a databased for exporting key-value data from Hadoop, Storm, a real-time analysis framework based on Hadoop, and Cascalog, a clojure based query language for Hadoop.

Current accounts at Backtype will continue to exist, but backtype already announced that they will stop to start new accounts.

From a view point of Twitter, I think this strategy makes perfect sense: First you provide rather open access to your data such that startups can start building interesting new products. Then you can pick the most interesting projects and incorporate them into Twitter. Basically, there is a lot of development of new ideas which is financed by the startup industry and which comes for free for Twitter, except for the winner, of course.

What has me worried is Twitter’s tendency in the past to openly discourage people from continuing to work in a field once they have acquired the relevant technology themselves, as has already happened with Twitter clients. Is the same going to happen with trending and social analysis tools next?

Twitter has always attracted people building new products and services because access to the data was relatively easy. However, this might change in the future if Twitter establishes a track record of closing down areas once it has what it thinks it needs, and people might become interested in more open platforms.

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