Twitter buys social analytics firm Julpan

IDG News Service - Twitter has acquired Julpan, a startup founded last year that analyzes the way people share information on the social web with the goal of delivering fresh and relevant content to users.

The acquisition was announced by Julpan founder and CEO Ori Allon announced on the company website.

"With more than 230 million Tweets per day on every subject imaginable, Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them," Allon said. "We look forward to joining forces with Twitter's engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan's innovations."

Twitter confirmed the acquisition in an email statement, but did not disclose the price paid for Julpan. "We acquired them because Ori Allon and his talented team have taken social search to an entirely new level. This will quickly enhance our ongoing efforts to surface more relevant content to users in real time," spokeswoman Lynn Fox said.

Allon founded Julpan in 2010 after working for Google. The search giant hired him in April 2006 and acquired his patented thesis work on the Orion search algorithm, which Google worked into its own search algorithm. Orion provides an expanded text excerpt from the list of Web site results, so that the user doesn't necessarily have to click over to those pages to see the information relevant to his query.

It also displays results which are topically related to the keywords the user entered, even if those keywords aren't found in those related pages.