Twitter buys analytics firm Smallthought Systems

Smallthought founders Avi Bryant, Andrew Catton, Ben Matasar and Luke Andrews have all joined the analytics team at Twitter, led by Kevin Weil (pictured).

Weil said the focus of the Smallthought team will be on “integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative real-time products for our future commercial partners”.

Twitter is still experimenting with ways to capitalise on its massive global audience. ‘Promoted tweets’ – ordinary Twitter messages that businesses and organisations want to bring to the attention of a wider group of users – is the first of the company’s revenue-generating ideas to go live.

So far, these promo messages are confined to Twitter search results, though the company plans to start serving them within users’ timelines at some point in the future.

“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,” said Weil, writing in a blog post.

The Trendly tool is now closed to new customers following the acquisition. It was designed to work in tandem with Google’s Analytics data to uncover and overlay key trend lines on raw traffic stats.