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, which also falls under and directly relates to the umbrella term, data sc ...

company based in

San Francisco, California San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

. The company was a certified

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

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+ (sometimes written as Google Plus, stylized as G+ or g+) was a Social networking service, social network owned and operated by Google until it ceased operations in 2019. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challe ...

. The company was acquired by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

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

History

Topsy was founded in 2007 by Vipul Ved Prakash, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Gary Iwatani and Justin Foutts. The company had raised over US$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, ...

Products

Topsy.com

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

and Google Plus. 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 for this. In English, it typically signifies a solution designed for a specific purpose, problem, or task rather than a generalized solution adaptable to collateral instances (compare with ''a pr ...

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 subje ...

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

SXSW Trendspotter

In March 2013,

Mashable Mashable is a Online newspaper, news website, digital media platform and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005. History Mashable was founded by Pete Cashmore while living in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 2004. Early iterations o ...

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 (SXSW) is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Texas. It began in 1987 and has conti ...

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

External links

* {{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 Defunct online companies of the United States