Apple just spent a bunch of money on social analytics company Topsy. And while everyone has good guesses on what Apple wants from Topsy, no one seems to know for sure. According to sources familiar with the matter, Twitter considered buying Topsy a number of times throughout the company’s six-year history.
Topsy’s value proposition is fairly straightforward. The company has had access to Twitter’s Firehose — the ever-flowing stream of all the tweets sent on Twitter — since practically the beginning of Twitter’s existence. It’s one of a few companies to have had full access to that data, and for years Topsy has been doing interesting things with
