Two years after it acquired Topsy, a San Francisco-based firm offering Twitter analytics to companies, Apple has officially shut down the service.
“We’ve searched our last tweet,” Topsy has noted on its official Twitter account. Topsy’s website redirects to an Apple support page detailing how users can use search features on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
We’ve searched our last tweet.
— Topsy (@Topsy) December 16, 2015
At the time of Topsy’s $200 million+ acquisition, the Wall Street Journal noted that, “There may be opportunities to link Topsy’s technology with Apple’s iTunes Radio, an online-streaming-music competitor to Pandora Media Inc. and Spotify AB. One possible scenario would use data from Topsy to alert listeners to songs that are trending or artists being discussed on Twitter.”
While Apple is gradually beefing up its social networking reach, it seems that most of the key employees who joined Cupertino as part of the deal are instead focusing on the more general problem of search across Apple’s various platforms. For instance, Topsy’s former co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Vipul Ved Prakash writes on LinkedIn that:
“Along with the incredibly talented Topsy team, I am leading the charge on the new search engines behind Spotlight & Safari. We are growing and it’s a very exciting time to be at Apple.”
Prakash lists his start date at Apple as being late 2013, so today’s announcement about the final absorption of Topsy into the Larger Apple Machine isn’t exactly going to come as a shock to many.
