Topsy Labs was a social search and

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

company based in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. The company was a certified

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

partner and maintained a comprehensive index of tweets, numbering in the hundreds of billions, dating back to Twitter's inception in 2006. Topsy made products to search, analyze and draw insights from conversations and trends on the public social websites including Twitter and

Google+ Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. The company was acquired by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

in December 2013, and shut down on December 16, 2015.

History

Topsy was founded in 2007 by

Vipul Ved Prakash Vipul Ved Prakash is a software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of anti-spam company Cloudmark, social-media search company Topsy, and open-source AI company TogetherAI. In 2013, Topsy was acquired by Apple Inc. The a ...

, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Gary Iwatani and Justin Foutts. The company had raised over USD $27 million in venture capital from BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund, Scott Banister and other investors. The company had over 40 employees with offices in San Francisco and Washington DC and was operating its own data centers. In December 2013, Topsy was acquired by

for a reported value of around $225 million. On December 16, 2015, the Topsy service was shut down, and its website was redirected to an Apple support page discussing the search functionality of

iOS 9 iOS 9 is the ninth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 8. It was announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8, 2015, and was released on September 16, 20 ...

Products

Topsy.com

Topsy.com was a real-time search engine for social posts and socially shared content, primarily on

and

Google Plus Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google ...

. The service ranked results using a proprietary social influence algorithm that measured social media authors on how much others supported what they were saying. The service also provided access to metrics for any term mentioned on Twitter via its free analytic service at analytics.topsy.com, where users could compare up to three terms for content in the past hour, day, week or month. It was announced in September 2013 that Topsy would include every public tweet ever published on Twitter for search and analysis.

Topsy Pro Analytics

Topsy Pro Analytics was a commercial web dashboard application that allowed users to conduct interactive analysis on keywords and authors by activity, influence, exposure, sentiment, language or geography. Users could discover the most relevant tweets, links, photos and videos for any term from Topsy’s index of hundreds of billions of tweets. Users were able to group terms into saved topics and setup customized alerts and daily activity digests.

Topsy Pro Analytics Public Sector

Topsy Pro Analytics was a version of the Topsy Pro Analytics product for government agencies. The intended purpose of the product was to facilitate disaster response, quantify political issues, detect disease outbreak and monitor global anomalies.

API Services

Topsy provided a set of REST APIs to programmatically access to Twitter data and metrics. Users could also access this data via

ad-hoc Ad hoc is a Latin phrase meaning literally 'to this'. In English, it typically signifies a solution for a specific purpose, problem, or task rather than a generalized solution adaptable to collateral instances. (Compare with ''a priori''.) Com ...

report requests.

Social indices

Twitter Political Index

This index was co-developed by Twitter and Topsy. It debuted in August 2012 and originally compared social sentiment for the two primary American presidential candidates.

Twitter Oscars Index

This index was also co-developed by Twitter and Topsy. It debuted in January 2013 and originally compared social sentiment for films nominated for Academy awards in six categories: Best Picture, Best Actor. Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director. Topsy

sentiment analysis Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjec ...

used in this index correctly predicted five out of the six award recipients.

SXSW Trendspotter

In March 2013,

Mashable Mashable is a digital media platform, news website and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005. History Mashable was founded by Pete Cashmore while living in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 2005. Early iterations of the site were a ...

and Topsy co-produced the Mashable SXSW Trendspotter, which was a mobile-enabled website where visitors could see what was trending at the

SXSW South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Te ...

event, based on real-time analysis of Twitter conversations. The SXSW Trendspotter provided analysis of: *Trending topics *Which start-ups, brands, bands and films were generating popular social conversations *Which SXSW sessions and events were the most popular *Details about the top tweets, news, photos and videos around each topic

References

{{Twitter navbox Twitter services and applications Web analytics Web archiving initiatives Internet properties established in 2006 Internet properties disestablished in 2015 Apple Inc. acquisitions 2013 mergers and acquisitions