Twitter acquires Smallthought Systems to improve analytics

Twitter is looking to improve its analytical capabilities

Twitter has acquired analytics firm Smallthought Systems in an effort to provide a greater understanding of the data the company collects.

The micro-blogging site was already in partnership with Smallthought, using its Trendly tool to help gain greater clarity into the data it collects.

Kevin Weil, analytics lead at Twitter, said in a blog post that the company hopes to now develop the tool further internally.

"Smallthought has joined our analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools, and building innovative real-time products for our future commercial partners," he said.

"Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service."

Twitter previously used a different product from Smallthought called Dabble DB to track and share information about projects.

The move marks yet another acquisition for Twitter after the firm bought SMS technology start up Cloudhopper in April and geo-location services provider Mixer Labs in December.

The terms of the Smallthought deal were not disclosed.