Crunching Numbers: Twitter Acqui-Hires Analytics Firm LuckySort

Twitter Lucky Sort

Twitter Lucky Sort

Twitter has been gobbling up analytics companies over the last year and they appear to still be hungry for more big data. Twitter has reportedly acqui-hired LuckySort, the developer of TopicWatch, a cloud-based text-mining application that analyzes large volumes of content like news, filings, blog posts and tweets.


 

The LuckySort application looks like this:

big data
 

What is Topic Watch?

Complex Analysis from Noah Pepper on Vimeo.

The CEO of LuckySort, Noah Pepper, described the move:

Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.

Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter!

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout.

The LuckySort service will be closing soon, but they’ll be helping current customers transition off the system in the coming months.

It appears Twitter is looking to crunch some numbers. But unfortunately for other Twitter analytics firms, this might not be the only thing they’re looking to crunch! Twitter has been cracking down on their API for sometime and has a recent history of pulling the rug out from under 3rd party apps. This new venture isn’t likely to be the exception.
 
Twitter’s approach may make sense from a business perspective to adopt a more closed ecosystem, however could this be at the expense of the developers who originally helped grow the Twitter platform?

Daniel Zeevi

By Daniel Zeevi

Daniel is a social network architect, web developer, infographic designer, writer, speaker and founder of DashBurst. Full-time futurist and part-time content curator, always on the hunt for disruptive new technology, creative art and web humor.

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