Twitter Buys BackType for Publisher Partner Tech

Twitter has made an outright acquisition of BackType, a small social analytics start-up with a deep technology focus on real-time, it announced today.

BackType’s product BackTweets helped customers like Edelman, AOL and Microsoft understand the impact and potential of their tweets, and the company was working on a project called Storm that it called “the Hadoop of realtime” and planned to make it open source.

BackType’s product and API are no longer open to new customers. Asked whether Storm would still be open source, a spokesperson for Twitter said, “We are aware of the interest in Storm, but it’s day one for the integration and we have lots to work through as the team gets settled.”

Twitter platform head Ryan Sarver said in an emailed comment, “BackType’s two founders, Christopher Golda and Michael Montano, were among the first to mine Twitter firehose data to help some of the world’s biggest publishers understand the impact of their Tweets. The BackType team will bring this technology and expertise to Twitter to help Web publishers get the most of out of the platform.”

San Francisco-based BackType had raised about $1 million from Y Combinator, True Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Manu Kumar, Chris Sacca, Raymond Tonsing and Seth Berman.