Apple acquires social media analytics firm Topsy

Apple yesterday announced the acquisition of Topsy Labs, a social analytics firm that tracks trending topics on Twitter and other social media networks,

According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal  is valued at over $200 million.

Topsy, one of the mirco-blogging network's  biggest partners, analyses ''the half a billion messages sent over Twitter every day and has indexed every tweet ever sent and has made them searchable, much like Google does for the web,'' The New York Times reported.

Topsy, describes itself as ''the only full-scale index of the public social web,'' and claims to have analysed all tweets since 2006. It adds, it can ''instantly analyze any topic, term or hashtag across years of conversations on millions of web sites.''

According to some commentators, while Apple had built some of its software to work with Twitter's service, the move was still puzzling. They say it was not clear why a hardware maker like Apple would be interested in Topsy.

Others believe that though Apple has largely kept away from the social media space - and failed to capitalise on social media technology - it now seems to be reconsidering the potential of the space.

However, Apple is not a complete stranger to social media, which acquired music discovery site Ping, but allowed it to die out.

Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman, without disclosing how much Apple paid for Topsy said, Apple bought smaller technology companies from time to time, and the company did not generally discuss its purpose or plans.

NYT quoted Ross Rubin, an independent analyst for Reticle Research, as saying Apple could use Topsy's data analysis to gain better understanding of popular trends on social media, make smarter recommendations for things like finding apps, music and movies to buy, or even finding content to watch with a future TV service.

Incidentally, Apple CEO Tim Cook took to tweeting only this year, something his predecessor never did. Cook has 18 tweets to his credit the most recent being his 1 December support to World Aids Day and Apple's promotion of Project Red in its retail stores.