Twitter founder Biz Stone has indicated that the company would likely make some acquisitions in the near future. Since that statement was made, people everywhere have been speculating who or what type of company it might be.

Here are some facts to consider:

• Twitter will offer premium commercial accounts by the end of this year
• Twitter’s advertising strategy will roll-out soon and “will be fascinating and completely non-traditional, and people will love it.”
• Twitter is a major indicator of Trends
• Deals with major search properties are already providing Twitter with revenue that is “well above” their projections for this year
• An IPO is a likely exit for founders and investors

I’ve been ruminating since this morning, trying to put myself in the position of Twitter management. With that in mind, here are some acquisitions to consider.

Commercial account holders will expect some level of added value, beyond just a verified account.  Some of that value may include a greater limit on their API calls and perhaps more granular access to the overall set of API’s. These account holders may also want access to trend data over time so they can positively react to trends before they peak. Reacting to these trends may require additional manpower (tweetpower? personpower?) making multi-user tools a necessity.

Advertisers that partake in Twitter’s “fascinating and completely non-traditional” approach will need to understand how their investment delivers returns – whether that be positive word or mouth, reach, distribution, click-throughs or sales.

With that in mind, I think Twitter may acquire companies that offer:

• Analytics
• URL Shortening
• Multi-User Access and Integration

Analytics

Twitter itself needs analytics and behavior tracking to run the business but more importantly, their key commercial constituents noted above will demand it.

Bit.ly and Chartbeat would be obvious candidates.

Most people know bit.ly as a URL shortener but the company is so much more than that. Click and retweet analytics is where bit.ly’s real value lies. Similarly, Chartbeat is a hosted analytics tool built around the concept of real-time. Visitor actions are tracked while keyword, sentiment and distribution data is collected and presented in a useful dashboard.

The three companies share investors and board members and bit.ly has already received some level of integration on the Twitter.com. Couple this with the fact that bit.ly has become the defacto standard within a number of native Twitter clients and I’d say the likelihood is high.

URL Shortener

See bit.ly, above.

Multi-User Access and Integration

The acquisition target is less apparent in this category. The competition is fierce and the services continue to bring new features and improvements to market.

The more mature offerings include CoTweet and HootSuite. Both services have support for multiple users and multiple twitter accounts but they differ a bit in terms of UI and a few other minor features. Either company would be a worthy acquisition.

What say you, readers? Who or what will be on Twitter’s shopping spree?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Acquisitions Likely in Twitter’s Future – Stone is a post from: TechStartups.com

I had the fortune today of having a conversation with Billy Chasen, the developer of Slurb and a founding member of BetaWorks. We kept it pretty geek centric as we talked about projects that we’ve worked on to learn more about each other.

After demoing something that I’ve had in my back pocket for a couple years he busted out something similar, Splurb. I say similar only in the capacity that it is filtering data so that people don’t have to. My system works by using people to filter content directly and his relies on filtering through narrow AI.

At its core, Splurb is pulling in links that are used on multiple content polling sites like Digg, Reddit and Tweetmeme to mention a few. He is pulling this data from a much larger pool of essentially what are human filtered recommendations. Those recommendations are simply their existence in any one single site compared to the others in the collective pool – see: if in Reddit and Digg list it on Splurb as a link. However, Splurb doesn’t stop there. That would be too easy.

Chasen then runs the links though additional filters that rank these links over time based on popularity. By applying human filters as the judge whether content is value through linking and a long-tail view of its performance over time he’s able to generate value for older content.

Why do this in a real-time world where the myopic preferences of a culture insists on immediacy? Because it works. Splurb address the real-time necessity of any application being built today (legacy of Billy’s work on chartbeat) with the presence of mind to understand the value of content can increase over time as new content is built on top of it.

By monitoring the most popular sites for content sharing via links and caching that data, Splurb becomes a collective knowledge base and barometer of what was important through time. Sure it is a new development by Chasen, but one that will lead to other valuable iterations of applications based on this historical perspective.

Splurb is part ranking system, part anthropological experiment and part history text. I’m eager to see how it shapes up and I have high hopes for it be a simple tool for discovery.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Splurb Getting It On With Narrow AI is a post from: TechStartups.com