Apple Buys Topsy To track Twitter. Apple has acquired Topsy Labs, a provider of analytics about activity on Twitter, in a deal that could improve its advertising services, iTunes content recommendations or the iPhone’s virtual assistant, Siri. Likened to a Google search for social media, Topsy’s search engine allows people to gauge the frequency with which a topic is mentioned and the sentiment around it. For example, when the Make-a-Wish Foundation arranged for a five-year-old leukaemia sufferer to play Batman for a day in San Francisco last month, Topsy’s data showed that 5 per cent of tweets from California were about the “SF Batkid”, generating 442m impressions in fewer than four hours, with the SF Giants baseball team and actress Alyssa Milano, from the sitcom Who’s the Boss?, among the most influential accounts talking about the event. Topsy is one of a handful of companies to license the Twitter “fire hose”, giving it full and immediate access to all its tweets, links and images as they are posted. In September, Topsy extended its index to include the first tweet in 2006 and everything since, giving it 425bn data points over seven years. Apple confirmed the acquisition but would not comment on its price, which one person familiar with the matter said was around $200m. Ongoing access to Twitter’s real-time data and interpretation of the 140-character musings of 230m users could be useful to Apple in a variety of ways. Sentiment analysis on social media is increasingly used by advertisers who want to understand the results of their campaigns. Apple stepped up its ad products with the launch of iTunes Radio earlier this year, even though its iAd banners for in-app advertising have not proven as successful as its rivals, including Google. Facebook and Twitter, have also made strong inroads into mobile advertising, especially for app makers, to drive downloads and usage. A constant flow of tweets, as well as the seven-year archive of past posts, could also aid the results of the iPhone’s voice-controlled assistance service, Siri. Since the launch of iOS 7in the northern hemisphere summer, the Siri service has been able to search Twitter directly and also provides tweets in response to user questions about what a particular person is talking about or what people are saying about a certain subject. Topsy could improve this product as well as help to fine-tune its artificial intelligence algorithm. Further, as Twitter becomes as companion app to many television shows, Topsy’s feed of data could prove useful as a part of any improvements to Apple TV, by making real-time recommendations about what to watch or providing second-screen commentary about a live onscreen event
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 08:00:12 +0000
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