“Apple Inc has shut down its Topsy Labs unit, which specialized in analyzing Twitter data and providing insights into current sentiment on a variety of topics, and the move prompted an outcry from many of its users,” Angela Moon and Melissa Fares report for Reuters. “The website for the platform www.topsy.com currently directs users to an Apple support page. On Tuesday night, Topsy sent out its last tweet from its @Topsy account: ‘We’ve searched our last tweet.'”
“Apple acquired Topsy in December 2013 for more than $200 million, an unusual purchase for a hardware-focused company that has made few forays into social networking,” Moon and Fares report. “San Francisco-based Topsy was one of Twitter’s early partners, enjoying direct access to the messaging service’s billions of tweets over several years. It has indexed them all to make them readily and rapidly searchable.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: iOS 9 features proactive search. It likely features Topsy technology. Your iOS device’s search screen is now prepopulated with contacts, apps, places nearby, and more. And it’s proactive in other places, too:
• Relevant people: See the contacts you talk with most, those you talked to last, or even those you’re next scheduled to meet.
• Places nearby: See categories of places nearby, like Food, Drink, Shopping, Fun, and more.
• Suggested apps: Suggested apps are triggered by your routines and what you’re most likely to use. For example, if you always read the news in the morning, your News app shows up in the search screen at the time you normally wake up.
• In the news: Based on your location, see local news that’s trending where you are.
