The long arm of Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), gets to touch users of Twitter. The Cupertino company has in fact bought the startup Topsy, a company that deals with social media research and, specifically, to analyze the data of the popular microblogging service.
Apple confirmed the acquisition, but didn't say why. According to rumors reported by the Wall Street Journal, it is a deal worth 200 million dollars.
The operation is quite unusual for a company that deals mainly with hardware. But the Apple, in recent times, has gone further.
Cupertino's main effort has focused on Ping, a social network based on sharing music that you have on iTunes. But the service, which allows users to post their favorite songs to a news feed, has failed to make a splash.
Meanwhile, Apple has tried - with new operating systems - to make it much easier to share photos, videos and news from your Mac, iPhone or iPad directly to Facebook and Twitter.
And then there's iTunes Radio, a streaming music service that competes with Pandora and could benefit from Topsy's data on user trends.
Topsy, who - like many startups - is based in San Francisco, as a partner of Twitter, has direct access to the billions of tweets that have been posted in recent years and has indexed them in such a way as to make them easily usable by social network brains or who can profit from it. In this case, Apple.
