Twitter has acquired social analytics startup BackType, the companies announced on Tuesday.
"We'll be brining out team and technology to Twitter's platform team, where our focus will be on developing tools for Twitter's publishing partners," BackType wrote in a blog post.
BackType is behind a product called BackTweets, which aids companies in understanding the influence of their 140-character messages. Clients have included companies like AOL and Microsoft. The company was also working on a project called Storm, a data-processing tool BackType calls the "Hadoop of realtime processing."
"Joining Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring insight to tens of millions of publishers around the world that are using Twitter to communicate and connect with their audience," the blog post continued. "We're also excited to bring our technology (especially Storm) to Twitter where it can have a big impact across the company."
San Francisco-based BackType is closing its products to new clients, but it will be free for existing customers.
Twitter's director of platform Ryan Sarver said: "BackType's two founders Christopher Golda and Michael Motano were among the first to mine Twitter firehose data to help some of the world's biggest publishers understand the impact of their tweet. The BackType team will bring this technology and expertise to Twitter to help Web publishers get the most our of the platform."
The BackType team will move to Twitter's San Francisco offices. Beyond that, the specifics of how Twitter will use BackType have not been revealed and the terms of the deal haven't bee divulged. There has been buzz in the past that Twitter would eventually build its own analytics tool. The BackType acquisition could mean there's some truth to that rumor.