Twitter has agreed to buy a company called Gnip. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Gnip is a social media provider and API aggregation company headquartered in Colorado. Besides providing data from dozens of social networks via one API, including Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, etc, which earned it the nickname Grand Central Station for the Social Web, Gnip is just one of a few Twitter partners with complete access to Twitter's full index of tweets since 2006.

"We partnered with Twitter four years ago to make it easier for organizations to realize the benefits of analyzing data across every public Tweet," revealed Gnip in a blog post on Tuesday. "We have delivered more than 2.3 trillion Tweets to customers in 42 countries who use those Tweets to provide insights to a multitude of industries including business intelligence, marketing, finance, professional services, and public relations."

With roughly 500 million tweets published a day, Gnip digests those tweets, then resells cropped data to customers, and provides analysis to advertisers. Owning such a feature-set would put Twitter at the monetisation helm of its own data - rather than having to go through partners like Gnip for a breakdown of its tweet firehose. That said, Twitter did receive $70.3 million in revenue last year from licensing its data to partners.

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"We believe Gnip has only begun to scratch the surface. Together we plan to offer more sophisticated data sets and better data enrichments, so that even more developers and businesses big and small around the world can drive innovation using the unique content that is shared on Twitter," announced Twitter in a blog post on Tuesday. "We will continue making our data available to Gnip’s growing customer base."

It therefore seems like Twitter will respect current contracts. As for Gnip, the social media firm will continue to operate as it does, with its main office and team staying put in Colorado for now.