If you thought Facebook or Google were aggressive in collecting your information to use it as advertising research, then think again. Twitter has been buying data/analytics companies for a while now and may start gearing up against Facebook and Google’s own data collection systems.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Credits: YourStory.com
Some of the companies Twitter bough include: Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytic company. MoPub, a mobile ad exchange that focuses on targeting data, and Gnip which is a company that collects data from all across the internet. Twitter also bought five smaller companies in 2013 as a way of expanding its reach into data collection.
Twitter’s possible plans for internet advertising are a bit scary. The question is this though: When do social networks cross the line from being useful for people to being massive data collection companies that are no different than the common computer virus?