Twitter announced that it has acquired Smallthought Systems, the creators of Dabble DB, an online database Twitter has used in the past to track and share information about projects internally.
"Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service," says Twitter Analytics Lead Kevin Weil.
Really excited. Welcome @avibryant, @andrewcatton, @matasar, and @attaboy to the Twitter analytics team! http://bit.ly/bo45qD
Kevin Weil
kevinweil
Twitter used Dabble DB up until last year, when the company "moved that project management tool in-house". "When Smallthought launched Trendly, a tool that helps web sites distinguish signal from noise in their Google Analytics data, we were among the first to try it," says Weil. "And, as Twitter is the world’s largest Ruby on Rails-based web service, we are impressed with their frequent contributions to the Ruby and Smalltalk development communities. Their team has a unique combination of entrepreneurship, creativity, and analytics expertise."
The Smallthought Systems team has joined Twitter’s analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into Twitter’s own tools, as well as building realtime products for Twitter’s future, according to Weil. Smallthought’s Andrew Catton says:
Obviously this represents a new chapter in the life of Dabble DB, both for us as a team and for the product itself. We’d like to assure you that, for now, we will continue to provide our software and technical support to current Dabble DB customers. However, we will be disabling new account signups effective immediately.
There will be further changes to Dabble’s ongoing operations, and when those happen, we want to do right by you. We will provide you with 60 days advance notice of any major change. We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that, at any time, you can export all of your data, including attachments, in a structured format suitable for import into other systems.
Earlier this week, Twitter announced a new link service, which it said will be used for analytical data in the future, and will be taken into consideration for its resonance algorithm – its system for the company’s Promoted Tweets offering.