Twitter acquires BackType

Twitter has acquired real-time analytics specialist BackType. In doing so, the micro-blogging service is after BackType's expertise in Apache Hadoop for ElephantDB, Storm and Cascalog; BackType has previously released a number of its developments as open source.

The focus of future development work will reportedly be on Storm, BackType's new real-time data processing system which will allow Tweets to be analysed more accurately. Like Cascalog and ElephantDB, Storm was originally intended to be published as open source. BackType has not yet made any specific statements on how the takeover will affect these plans. On Twitter Nathan Marz, BackType Lead Engineer, merely stated: "Our plans for Storm haven't changed. Have patience :)".

Above all, the Storm technology adds continuous computation (the output of events while other data is being processed) and distributed RPCs (remote procedure calls, which allow comprehensive queries to be parallelised) to classic stream processing (analysis of data in the stream).

It's likely that Twitter didn't have a hard time reaching its decision to acquire the firm, after all, investors recently found it to be worth approximately $7 billion.

See also:

• BackType has been acquired by Twitter, a BackType blog post.
• Twitter releases TwUI framework for Mac, a report from The H.

(crve)