Twitter Buys Big Data Firm Lucky Sort

Social media giant Twitter has acquired Portland, Oregon-based big data visualization and analytics startup Lucky Sort for an undisclosed amount.

In February, Twitter acquired Bluefin Labs - which tracks social media conversations about TV programs - in a deal worth between $50m and $100m. Its latest buy will give it access to Lucky Sort's natural language-based tool TopicWatch, through which users can sift through social media, government filings, news and commentary, and analyze text-based content. According to a number of analysts, the platform could now be used for analysis of Twitter data.

As part of the deal, Lucky Sort co-founders Noah Pepper (pictured), Jesse Smith and Daniel Fennelly are moving to San Francisco to join Twitter's revenue engineering department.

In a message on Lucky Sort's blog, Pepper commented: 'Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis. Today I'm very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter.'

Web sites: www.twitter.com and www.luckysort.com .