Wall St's DROOLING as Twitter GULPS DOWN analytics firm Gnip

Stock price boost on potential to earn big bucks from tweets

Twitter has bought its long-time collaborator Gnip, a analytics firm that should help the social media firm turn its red balance sheets black.

Gnip specializes in taking social media feeds and studying them to extract financially useful information. It's one of four companies with access to Twitter's firehose of feeds, and also has full access to data from Foursquare, Tumblr, and WordPress, as well as the public information from sites such as Facebook.

"Gnip has played a crucial role in collecting and digesting our public data and delivering the most essential Tweets to partners," said Jana Messerschmidt, VP of business development and platform at Twitter.

"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."

Gnip's existing customers will still get full access to the company's data, Messerschmidt promised, and Twitter will extend the amount of data that can be culled from social-media streams. But in the meantime, the buy will let Twitter earn more money from the tweets of its user base.

"We'll be able to support a broader set of use cases across a diverse set of users including brands, universities, agencies, and developers big and small," said Gnip CEO Chris Moody. "Joining Twitter also provides us access to resources and infrastructure to scale to the next level and offer new products and solutions."

Wall Street reacted positively to the news, with Twitter's stock price rising over ten per cent. The social media's stock price has been sliding since the start of the year, but now the analysts suspect Twitter might be getting serious about making a profit someday. ®