Twitter has acquired Lucky Sort, a data analytics company, in a move that could give the social network deeper insights into its users' tweets and how to best place advertisements on its site.
Lucky Sort's technology is designed to "make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis," Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said Monday in a post on the company's website.
Twitter didn't say how it plans to make use of the technology, though tools that help it to analyze what users are saying on its site could clearly be useful to the company.
"Welcome aboard," was all Twitter had to say about the deal, and terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed.
Pepper implied that Lucky Sort will no longer be offered as a product, at least in its current form. "We'll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter," he said.
Several employees at the company, based in Portland, Oregon, will be relocating to Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, to join its "revenue engineering" department, Pepper said. "If you're in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization, give us a shout," he said.
On his own Twitter feed, Pepper describes Lucky Sort's business as "working to turn databases into useful intelligence for investors and operators."
Both Twitter and Lucky Sort declined to comment further.
There will be more to analyze on Twitter in the coming months. In April, Twitter expanded its Cards program, giving developers more options to embed content into tweets. Last month it also rolled out "keyword targeting in timelines," to give advertisers the option to place Promoted Tweets in users' timelines based on certain keywords or phrases.
Twitter has been on a buying spree of late. Last week it snapped up Ubalo, a multi-platform code scaling service. Other recent acquisitions include We are Hunted and Bluefin Labs.
Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is zach_miners@idg.com
