Twitter Said to Be Launching Image Service, Acquiring AdGrok
Friday, July 22, 2011
, Posted by Unknown at 12:48 PM
Last week, Twitter officially announced its acquisition of TweetDeck, and if there is merit to the rumors emerging, the company also has some other fairly big news on the way.
Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch is reporting, citing "multiple sources," that the company is both close to acquiring AdWords keyword bidding platform AdGrokand launching its own photo service.
AdGrok, backed by Y Combinator, consists of Antonio Garcia-Martinez, Matthew McEachen, and Argyris Zymnis, but as Tsotsis points out, Garcia-Martinez has actually changed his title on Facebook to Product Manager at Facebook, which raises other questions.
It's unclear exactly what Twitter would do with AdGrok. It could simply be a talent acquisition that could be used to develop its own advertising platform. The deal is said to be for less than $10 million.
The other rumor is quite interesting as well, and frankly makes a great deal of sense. Twitter has become a place for people to quickly upload pictures, but they've always had to use third-party platforms, and TwitPic and YFrog have largely dominated this space.
Given Twitter's acquisition of TweetDeck, it's clear that the company is interested in the continued evolution of Twitter itself, and an image service is a fairly obvious element – especially in light of Twitter's role in significant events, like revolutions.
Things seem to be happening at a much more rapid pace at Twitter since the return of co-founder Jack Dorsey. It will be very interesting to see if this pattern continues.
