Twitter has announced the acquisition of Gnip, one of the world’s largest and most trusted providers of social data.

In a statement, the microblogging site said it’s plan was to make its data even more accessible to consumers, and to do that it needs to work with them to better understand what their needs are.

“To that end, we have agreed to acquire Gnip, a leading provider of social data and a long-standing Twitter data partner,” Jana Messerschmidt, Twitter’s VP for Global Business Development & Platform, wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

“As Twitter has grown into a platform that delivers more than 500 million Tweets per day, Gnip has played a crucial role in collecting and digesting our public data and delivering the most essential Tweets to partners,”

Gnip is one of a handful of partners that has a full access to Twitter’s firehose, the entire stream of tweets flowing through Twitter on a second-by-second basis. It filters the firehose and resells data to advertisers or other companies, and also tries to predict trends and get an insight as to what the people want.

Gnip and other data sellers exist for the simple fact that social sites cannot handle their data.  Third-parties therefore try to make sense of it in a short period to determine which data is valuable for different sectors in the market.

“Combining forces with Twitter allows us to go much faster and much deeper. We’ll be able to support a broader set of use cases across a diverse set of users including brands, universities, agencies, and developers big and small. Joining Twitter also provides us access to resources and infrastructure to scale to the next level and offer new products and solutions,” Gnip CEO Chris Moody posted on its site.

Moody reiterated that the acquisition signals the recognition of how important investing in social data can be.

Aside from Gnip, other members of Twitter’s Certified Partner Program include Datasift, NTT Data, and the startup Topsy Labs, which Apple has acquired for more than $200 million in December. These companies act as the middle-man between Twitter and other companies that wanted access to the microblogging service’s data.

It’s been suggested that Twitter didn’t put much focus on reselling its data and even asked those interested a fee to access it, to prove how important the data they have is for the interested parties. However, Twitter was given a wake up call when Apple acquired Topsy, making it realize how important social data is. Analysts speculate that Topsy’s technology will be integrated with Siri to deliver a more personalized search experience, marketers will be more interested to advertise on Apple, and record labels could use it to sell more records on iTunes.

The acquisition of Topsy said to have rattled Twitter as it opened the possibility of other competitors swooping in and acquiring its remaining partners.  If that happened, Twitter would be left with no choice but to build its own big data infrastructure.

Repercussions

One of the possible downsides of Twitter’s acquisition of Gnip is that the firehose may no longer become available to other data resellers. Twitter now owns a data reseller which may mean it no longer needs its other partners. If Twitter doesn’t sever its ties with other data resellers, there’s also the possibility that it may filter what can be accessed by these outside resellers.

Another question arises over Gnip’s relationship with other social services. Though Gnip stated that it doesn’t plan to quit reselling data from Tumblr, WordPress, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Foursquare, these companies may sever ties with it as it’s no longer an independent data reseller. This makes sense since there’s a possibility for Twitter to access data from competitors without their knowledge and use it for its own gains.

Twitter has yet to reveal its grand plan for Gnip.

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