The little blue bird that built the flock in its nest

The little blue bird called Twitter, which was born in 2006, has seen similar growth patterns in the last 16 years as that of a human being. A new-born child doesn't have any name. Then it gets one, starts growing, acquires different qualities and behaviours in its evolution as an individual.

In the last decade-and-a-half, Twitter has made nearly 70 acquisitions (including its domain name).

In his book, Things a little bird told me, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone says that the then start-up had not bought the domain name twitter.com. It was owned by a bird enthusiast. “Instead we set up the service at twttr.com,” he says. If you type that on your web browser now, it will re-direct you to twitter.com.

Buys vowel

On September 7, 2006, (five months after launching the start-up), Evan Williams, co-founder, on his personal blog posted: “We bought the vowels”. As a baby, Twitter had acquired a name that would become a phenomenon in the years to come.

Twitter, which was taking baby steps, did not venture for new acquisitions for two years. The first real acquisition was a search engine in 2008. While announcing the acquisition of the search engine — Summize — on July 15, 2008, through a blog post, Biz Stone highlighted the need to search, filter, and interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second.

Explaining the marriage between the two start-ups then, Jay Virdy, co-founder of Summize, said: “We tamed the Twitter public timeline by bringing some order to the chaos.”

Since 2008, Twitter has acquired more than 65 start-ups in different areas of activities. BusinessLine has been able to collect information on 69 acquisitions so far.

Evan Williams, who was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Twitter 2008-10, saw a few acquisitions during his tenure. One of them was the addition of ‘where is it happening?’ functionality to the ‘what’s happening?’ feature of Twitter. The acquisition of the San Mateo-based ‘Mixer Labs’ provided location engine for developers.

The product worked to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets. A Twitter blog post said that when current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge.

There was a shift towards analytics and mobile solutions in the acquisitions during 2010.

Costolo buys more

Though two of the founders — Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey— were CEOs of the company during the initial years, a majority of acquisitions came under the leadership of a non-founder Dick Costolo, who was Twitter CEO from 2010-15.

Announcing his decision to hand over the baton to Costolo, Williams wrote in a Twitter blog post on October 4, 2010, that Twitter had grown from a 20-member start-up when he took charge as CEO in 2008 to 300 people.

Giving some details about the company, he had said that the number of tweets went up from 1.25 million a day in 2008 to 90 million a day in 2010, and the registered users increased from three million to more than 165 million.

The growing number of user base and tweets and mobile usage seems to have pushed the acquisitions in different areas of its operation.

Tweetdeck — which many Twitter users prefer for real-time tracking, organising and to engage with a tweet— was one of the few major acquisitions by Twitter in 2011. Another notable acquisition that year was Julpan, a social activity search engine. Announcing the acquisition of Julpan by Twitter, Ori Allon, founder of Julpan, had stated in a blog post that the search technology analysed social activity across the web to deliver fresh and relevant content to users bringing them closer to what is most meaningful to them.

Other buys included an online advertisement platform and a market intelligence platform for brands and agencies, among others.

Twitter seemed to have focused on diversified strategy in its acquisitions during 2012, if the ventures acquired during the period were any indication. The acquisitions included Vine, a start-up that created short looping video clips, mobile app developers, internet security firm, and social media analytics start-up.

Big Data

Hotspots.io, a social media analytics start-up, which announced its acquisition by Twitter in a blog post in October 2012, said that its team would join Twitter's revenue engineering team to focus on developing analytics tools for advertising and publishing partners of Twitter.

Big data of the social media space set the tone for acquisitions in 2013, apart from a few other buys in other areas.

It ventured into the area of social TV analytics with Bluefin Labs, which provided data products to brand advertisers, agencies, and TV networks.

Other buys such as Lucky Sort developed a big data visualisation and navigation engine for exploring emergent patterns in live text streams; and Spindle built the discovery engine for the social web.

Another buy in data space included Locomatix Inc. It operated a single unified platform for real-time stream and analytic data processing, which sorted and analysed through millions of location-based data feeds, including user locations, and location-based offers. Trendrr was a platform exploiting the value of real-time social data to provide media and advertising solutions.

The focus on big data in the social media space continued in 2014. In fact, it was the year where the company picked a maximum number of ventures in different areas in its history.

A few acquisitions included Mesagraph (a service that built bundles of information from social media that are relevant to users), SecondSync (which provided social analytical data pertaining to television viewership), and Gnip (which provided social media data for customers in sectors such as social media monitoring, business intelligence, government, and finance).

Considering the need to improve its focus on deep learning, Twitter acquired Mad Bits, in that space.

Most of Twitter’s acquisitions were from the US and Europe. In 2015, an Indian start-ups became part of Twitter. The Bengaluru-based ZipDial was founded on the insight that consumers and brands in emerging markets behave differently and have different needs. It had developed a marketing and analytics platform that enabled brand managers to drive customer engagement by capitalising on this theme.

One of the prized possessions of the year was Periscope that provided a platform to explore the world in real time through video feeds.

Fake news

To control the menace of fake news in social media, Twitter acquired a geometric deep learning and fake news detection start-up – Fabula.AI – in 2019. In a blog post announcement in 2019, Twitter had stated that Fabula AI employs graph deep learning to detect network manipulation. It had then stated that graph deep learning is a novel method for applying powerful ML (machine learning) techniques to network-structured data. The result is the ability to analyse very large and complex datasets describing relations and interactions, and to extract signals in ways that traditional ML techniques are not capable of doing.

“Our acquisition of Fabula builds on other investments we’ve made in machine learning, for example, Madbits in 2014, Whetlab in 2015 and Magic Pony in 2016,” the blog post had stated then.

Threads in Twitter

These days the usage of threads in Twitter is quite common. It was also a part of an acquisition by Twitter in 2021.

While announcing the decision to join Twitter in 2021, the Threader co-founders stated that Threader was born four years ago from an assessment. With the kind of content shared by people on Twitter who worked around the 280 character limit to express longer thoughts, they were hard to find and even more difficult to read. The first prototype of Threader was an iOS app recommending interesting threads to read in an article format, it had stated then.

On April 12 this year, Twitter announced the acquisition of OpenBack, a mobile platform that helps make apps more engaging through device-side control of push notifications.

In a tweet, Jay Sullivan, Head of Consumer Products at Twitter, had stated that the best push notifications bring people to conversations they care about on Twitter. But irrelevant notifications are a distraction. “With millions of people visiting Twitter via notifications every day, we want them to be timely, relevant and engaging,” he had stated then.

Twitter is 16 years old now. As an adolescent curious to know many things, Twitter has found a new nest in a greener pasture to get answers and grow further.

With a throwback picture of co-founders and the picture of Elon Musk, who has offered to take over the company, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, tweeted: “How it started. How it’s going””

Yes. Only time will tell.