Just a few months after purchasing Dabble DB maker Smallthought Systems Inc., it appears Twitter Inc. is putting its newly acquired Canadian employees on a major project.
The social networking giant reportedly plans to build out a real-time analytics dashboard and make it freely available to users in Q4 2010, according to Ross Hoffman of Twitter’s business development team.
Digital marketing and analytics software firm WebTrends Inc. reported Hoffman’s comments on its company blog after attending a session featuring the Twitter employee at this week’s Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
WebTrends said the platform will start out as a beta release and then move to a phased rollout. This is similar to the way Twitter has launched other new initiatives, such as its promoted tweets feature and its newly redesigned user interface.
The product is expected to let users identify which tweets are spreading as well as which users are the most influential in their networks.
In response to a request for comment from ComputerWorld Canada, Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner did not confirm or deny Hoffman’s comments.
“We’ve been talking about providing analytics since last December, but have nothing to add at this time,” she wrote in an e-mail response.
The fact that Smallthought’s Vancouver employees are involved should come as no surprise to anybody that followed the acquisition news earlier this summer. At that time, Twitter said it planned to use the start-up’s Trendly technology to build a real-time analytics tool for businesses.
“When Smallthought launched Trendly, a tool that helps Web sites distinguish signal from noise in their Google Analytics data, we were among the first to try it,” the company said in a blog post.
Twitter added that the Smallthought team would be integrated into the company’s analytics unit and would focus on both integrating ideas from Trendly into its current tools and building out real-time analytics apps for its future commercial partners.