Social analytics, Topsy has been purchased by Apple for more than $200 million. According to its website, Topsy is a search and analytics company which partners with Twitter retain old Tweets, dating back to 2006.
With Topsy’s analytic tools, companies would be able to analyze keywords in several different categories such as activity, geography, exposure or general public sentiment. The website also serves as a useful search engine which looks through shared content on social networks and ranks. These results are taken from the social influence algorithm. Topsy also make products for Google+, the searching and analyzing trends on the website.
Topsy mainly specializes in data management and collection from Twitter. It offers tools to analyze tweets. It also helps in tracking consumer sentiment. Essentially, its tools look for a specific term in twitter, and find an influential person in that particular subject, or an event or a campaign occurring in the near future.
The company would now have access to Twitter’s “fire-hose”- the entire stream of all the tweets posted. The main competitor to Topsy is DataSift Inc. and Gnip Inc. Like Topsy, they analyze and resell this data to customers.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies often, and we don’t like to discuss our intention of acquiring such companies”, an Apple spokesperson said.
Apple could use Topsy’s technology within iTunes Radio. It would be a useful App in the App Store, by delivering content recommendations based on Twitter activities.
Apple’s purchase of Topsy is a different one compared to their previous ones which mainly focused on mapping. According to Apple CEO, Tim Cook, Apple has made 15 acquisitions in 2013.