Twitter has acquired its longtime partner, the US-based social data provider Gnip, for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition is expected to allow Twitter better evaluate the half billion tweets exchanged using the social networking platform.
Also, Twitter can gain selling the data extracted using Gnip, while having better control of information shared using the micro-blogging site.
Previously, Twitter allowed companies such as Gnip, Datasift and Dataminr to access the tweets and re-sell the evaluated data to corporate clients.
Twitter vice president Jana Messerschmidt said in a blog post, "Public tweets can reveal a wide variety of insights — so much so that academic institutions, journalists, marketers, brands, politicians and developers regularly use aggregated Twitter data to spot trends, analyze sentiment, find breaking news, connect with customers and much more."
According to Twitter, both the companies plan to offer better data sets and data enrichments to help developers drive innovation using the content shared on the platform.
Gnip CEO Chris Moody said in a blog post that combining forces with Twitter allows the company to go much faster and much deeper.
"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," Moody added.
"Joining Twitter also provides us access to resources and infrastructure to scale to the next level and offer new products and solutions."
Founded in 2008, Gnip has been working with Twitter for the past four years, while providing data from social media content on Tumblr, WordPress, Reddit, Instagram, and Foursquare.
Meanwhile, Twitter has hired mobile apps expert Daniel Graf as new vice president for its consumer products business.
Graf, who was till recently a director in Google, fills the position which has been vacant for the past four months.
