Twitter acquired the social-data company Gnip in 2014 to expand access to its real-time data.
Gnip was founded in 2008 and became a major provider of social-media data to businesses, researchers, and developers. It already had a relationship with Twitter, helping customers access and analyze public tweets through structured data products.
Twitter announced the acquisition in April 2014. Bringing Gnip into the company strengthened Twitter’s data-licensing business and gave it additional technology for organizing, filtering, and delivering the enormous stream of public conversations on the platform.
Gnip was not the same as Dataminr, a separate company that used Twitter data for real-time alerts. The acquisition also did not mean that ordinary users were buying access to private messages; the business focused primarily on licensed public data and analytics.