Twitter has made another move towards monetizing their service through acquisition of a small startup called “Lucky Sort”, creators of a technology called TopicWatch.
In effect, Lucky Sort was a big data play – it used NLP (natural language processing) techniques to discover information from huge, unstructured data sets. What made it unique was its ability to derive structure without having to first define a database of nouns, verbs, etc. as traditionally would be the case with NLP. Instead, Lucky Sort was moved towards data mining through statistics rather than input ontologies.
Three of the key engineers behind TopicWatch are now joining twitter’s “Revenue Engineering Department”, which sounds like a very cryptic name that’s sure to conjure images of suits, ties, and greasy salesmen. LuckySort has already proven to be fascinating in their integrations with StockTwits and a few other tools that could distill the massive twitter firehose into interesting interactive visualizations and data-mining tools. So watch yourself on twitter, you never know what might come up next.
