Topsy Labs

Topsy Labs was a social search and analytics company based in San Francisco, California.^[1][2] The company was a certified Twitter partner and maintained a comprehensive index of tweets, numbering in the hundreds of billions, dating back to Twitter's inception in 2006.^[3][4][5]

Topsy Labs, Inc.

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Social network analytics^[1]
Founded	2007
Founder	Vipul Ved Prakash Rishab Aiyer Ghosh Gary Iwatani Justin Foutts
Defunct	December 16, 2015
Fate	Acquired by Apple Inc.
Headquarters	San Francisco, California , United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Duncan Greatwood - CEO Vipul Ved Prakash - Co-Founder and CTO Rishab Aiyer Ghosh – Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Rich Maier – SVP, Sales Jamie de Guerre – VP, Product Ted Cui – VP, Engineering David Berk – VP, Operations
Services	Twitter and Google+ analytics
Website	topsy.com

Topsy made products to search, analyze and draw insights from conversations and trends on the public social websites including Twitter and Google+.^[6][7][8]

The company was acquired by Apple Inc. 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.^{[citation needed]} The company had raised over USD $27 million in venture capital from BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund, Scott Banister and other investors.^[9][10] The company had over 40 employees with offices in San Francisco and Washington DC and was operating its own data centers.^[11]

In December 2013, Topsy was acquired by Apple Inc. 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.^[12][13]

Products

Topsy.com

Topsy.com was a real-time search engine for social posts and socially shared content, primarily on Twitter and Google Plus.^[14][15] The service ranked results using a proprietary social influence algorithm that measured social media authors on how much others supported what they were saying.^[16] 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.^[17] It was announced in September 2013 that Topsy would include every public tweet ever published on Twitter for search and analysis.^[18]

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.^[19] Users could discover the most relevant tweets, links, photos and videos for any term from Topsy’s index of hundreds of billions of tweets.^[2] Users were able to group terms into saved topics and setup customized alerts and daily activity digests.^[20][21]

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.^[22]

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 report requests.

Social indices

Twitter Political Index

This index^[23] 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^[24] was also co-developed by Twitter and Topsy.^[25] 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 used in this index correctly predicted five out of the six award recipients.

SXSW Trendspotter

In March 2013, Mashable and Topsy co-produced the Mashable SXSW Trendspotter,^[26] which was a mobile-enabled website where visitors could see what was trending at the SXSW event, based on real-time analysis of Twitter conversations.^[27] 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

1. Boutin, Paul (2011-07-26). "Topsy Searches Twitter Better Than Twitter". The New York Times. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
2. "Topsy Pro Analytics Lets Users Analyze Over 100 Billion Tweets From The Last 2+ Years". Marketingland.com. 2012-08-21. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
3. "Topsy: Now Searching Tweets Back To May 2008". Searchengineland.com. 2010-08-24. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
4. . Dev.twitter.com. Archived from the original on 2013-03-13. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
5. Goel, Vindu (2013-09-04). "If Google Could Search Twitter, It Would Find Topsy". New York Times.
6. Tam, Donna (2012-08-21). "Topsy tailors tool to tease out Twitter trends to a 'T' | Internet & Media". CNET. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
7. "7 Ways Marketers Can Leverage Topsy Pro". Ignite Social Media. 2012-09-12. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
8. Gannes, Liz (2011-10-11). "Topsy Adds Real-Time Search for Google+". AllThingsD. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
9. Thursday, March 10th, 2011 (2011-03-10). "Realtime Search Platform Topsy Raises $15 Million". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2013-05-14.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
10. Geron, Tomio (2009-05-27). "Topsy Bets On Real-Time Twitter Search With $15M Backing - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ". Blogs.wsj.com. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
11. Jeff Bertolucci (2012-08-07). "How Topsy Tames Twitter's Big Data Fire Hose". Informationweek.com. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
12. "Apple shuts down Twitter analytics service Topsy". The Verge. 16 December 2015. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
13. "Why Apple Really Acquired Topsy". Inc. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
14. "Topsy Launches Realtime Search Engine For Public Google+ Posts". TechCrunch. 2011-10-11. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
15. "Who rules real-time search? A look at 11 contenders". VentureBeat. 21 June 2009. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
16. Adam Popescu (2012-10-24). "Beyond Klout: Better Ways To Measure Social Media Influence". Readwrite.com. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
17. "Topsy Social Analytics: Twitter Analytics For The Masses (& Free, Too)". Searchengineland.com. 2011-01-31. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
18. "Topsy: Allows You To Scan Every Public Tweet Ever Published On Twitter". CEOWORLD Magazine. 2013-09-04. Retrieved 2013-09-04.
19. Honan, Mat (2012-08-21). "You Are the Product: Topsy's New Pro Analytics Tool As the All-Seeing Eye | Gadget Lab". Wired.com. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
20. "Social Analytics Service Topsy Adds Email Alerts and Reports". SocialTimes. 2013-02-25. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
21. "Topsy Launches New Features for Pro Analytics". semanticweb.com. 2012-10-18. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
22. "Topsy Introduces Topsy Pro Analytics for the Public Sector". Marketwire.com. 2012-09-10. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
23. "U.S. Elections". Twitter. Retrieved 3 September 2018.
24. . Archived from the original on 12 May 2013.
25. Graver, Fred (2013-01-15). "Tracking the Oscar buzz | Twitter Blog". Blog.twitter.com. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
26. . Mashable. Archived from the original on August 4, 2020.
27. Josh Catone2013-03-08 15:05:40 UTC (2013-03-08). "Discover What's Hot at SXSW With the Mashable Trendspotter". Mashable.com. Retrieved 2013-05-14.