Twitter buys social analytics company BackType

Just weeks after snapping up TweetDeck, Twitter has acquired social analytics start-up BackType. The company’s main product, BackTweets, has helped companies like AOL and Microsoft understand the influence of their tweets. BackType has also been in the midst of developing Storm, a new data-processing tool that the company calls the “Hadoop of realtime processing.”

“Joining Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring insight to tens of millions of publishers around the world that are using Twitter to communicate and connect with their audience,” BackType wrote in a blog post. “We’re also excited to bring our technology (especially Storm) to Twitter where it can have a big impact across the company.”

For now, the San Francisco-based company is shutting its doors to new clients, but it will continue to offer its services for free to existing customers.

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

The BackType team will be packing up their office and will move to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Although extensive details regarding the deal haven’t been disclosed, the acquisition provides further evidence that Twitter wants to eventually build its own analytics tool.