Twitter announced on Tuesday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Gnip, a social data provider that’s been a Twitter partner for quite some time. Twitter says Gnip has played a “crucial role” in collecting and digesting Twitter’s public data as the platform has grown to over 500 million tweets per day.

Gnip CEO Chris Moody explains in a blog post, “We partnered with Twitter four years ago to make it easier for organizations to realize the benefits of analyzing data across every public Tweet. The results have exceeded our wildest expectations. 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.”

“We believe Gnip has only begun to scratch the surface,” says Jana Messerschmidt, VP, Global Business Development & Platform at Twitter. “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. We will continue making our data available to Gnip’s growing customer base. And with the help of Gnip’s Boulder-based team, we will be extending our data platform — through Gnip and our existing public APIs — even further.”

“Combining forces with Twitter allows us to go much faster and much deeper,” writes Moody. “We’ll be able to support a broader set of use cases across a diverse set of users including brands, universities, agencies, and developers big and small. Joining Twitter also provides us access to resources and infrastructure to scale to the next level and offer new products and solutions.”

“This acquisition signals clear recognition that investments in social data are healthier than ever,” he adds. “Our customers can continue to build and innovate on one of the world’s largest and most trusted providers of social data and the foundation for innovation is now even stronger. We will continue to serve you with the best data products available and will be introducing new offerings with Twitter to better meet your needs and help you continue to deliver truly innovative solutions.”

Here’s a talk Moody gave at the Business of APIs Conference last fall about how social data will change decisions:

“Every day Twitter users share and discuss their interests and what’s happening in the world,” says Messerschmidt. “These public Tweets can reveal a wide variety of insights — so much so that academic institutions, journalists, marketers, brands, politicians and developers regularly use aggregated Twitter data to spot trends, analyze sentiment, find breaking news, connect with customers and much more.”

The company says it will reveal more about its plans for Gnip and the Twitter data platform in the future.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Last year, Twitter made some other interesting data acquisitions with Lucky Sort and Trendrr. Earlier this month, news came out that Twitter has acquired Cover, an Android lockscreen app.

Image via Gnip