As part of its growing quest to analyze those countless tweet streams, Twitter announced Thursday that it has purchased Smallthought Systems. The Vancouver, British Columbia, startup makes the Dabble DB online database and the Trendly Internet analytics tool. The acquisition price was not disclosed.
On the company’s blog, Kevin Weil, the Twitter analytics lead, posted Thursday that his company had maintained a relationship with Smallthought ever since using Dabble to track and share internal project information. He added that Twitter was one of the first companies to try Trendly, which allows sites to analyze information in Google Analytics data. In addition, since Twitter is what Weil described as the “world’s largest Ruby on Rails-based web service,” the contributions of the Smallthought development team to the Ruby and Smalltalk communities impressed the larger company.
Building ‘Innovative Real-Time Products’
Weil said Smallthought joins Twitter’s analytics team and will “focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools” and building “innovative real-time products for our future commercial partners.”
He described the company’s team as a “unique combination of entrepreneurship, creativity and analytics expertise.” The key team members will be moving in the fall to San Francisco.
On its web site, Smallthought posted that “operations of both its Dabble DB service and technical support will continue as usual until further notice,” although it will no longer be accepting new sign-ups for accounts. If the service is terminated, it said, customers will get at least 60 days’ notice.
Smallthought promotes Dabble DB as a way to port data in spreadsheets into Dabble DB, and then do structured searches and other organizing and calculating operations. Data can also be displayed in a wide variety of ways, such as a map view to present visualized versions of the data.
In announcing the sale on its site, Smallthought described the Twitter company environment…