After Google announced Google+ to win the social networking battle, we have heard a lot about how the new service may destabilize the unipolarity enjoyed so far by Facebook.
However, most bloggers and journalists curiously did not speak much about twitter probably because they got carried away with the whole ‘Google vs. Facebook’ soap opera. It was announced a little while ago that Twitter has acquired BackType and the team and technology would be moved to Twitter, where they will focus on developing tools for Twitter. BackType was a premier service that told its customers how their tweets were being propagated through Twitter and it also gave them information about influential people on Twitter for a company or a product. This information is invaluable for marketing companies and would eventually earn a lot of money for Twitter.
BackType’s core technology which includes its Storm feature could also be one of the reasons why Twitter acquired the small start-up. The technology processes the most important Twitter data in real time, which would help social media analysts to gather information about people, products and topics that are trending across Twitter. Twitter slowly, silently but surely has begun to consolidate its position in the social networking battle, and so far the media attention has focussed on Google and Facebook.
What most social media experts, journalists and bloggers missed was Twitter’s importance in the business world, finance and marketing. Twitter is not just about personal Tweets by celebrities and wannabes, but it is also about analysing very important market and finance related data, and also political and cultural trends. By acquiring technology that would help Twitter to analyse social media in general, it probably has won a smaller battle itself without creating a lot of noise. Meanwhile, BackType announced that they would no longer be accepting new users, and the BackType product would be discontinued until Twitter integrates it itself. You could also read about the Twitter Analysis Product, and Twitter’s Photo-sharing Service.
