Yesterday, RestEngine announced that it was acquired by Twitter in a deal, the terms of which were not disclosed. The acquisition was designed to bring both RestEngine’s tech and talent onboard at Twitter, RestEngine co-founder Joe Waltman told BetaKit in an interview. Twitter will likely use its newly acquired assets to help bolster its email communication to users, through more personalized options that better leverage social insights gathered from users.
Waltman, who isn’t staying on with Twitter post-acquisition, instead opting to focus on a couple entrepreneurial projects he has in the works, told BetaKit that RestEngine’s real strength lies in its ability to help email marketers deliver more targeted campaigns using information gathered from a user’s social graph, including information culled from Facebook, Twitter and other social web sources. Waltman didn’t comment on any specific avenues Twitter might take, but suggested that in general, the company would hope to improve its email interactions with users.
The RestEngine tech and team could help Twitter re-capture and re-engage users who’ve signed up but since dropped off the grid. Studies suggest that while Twitter has a lot of sign-ups, activity on the network often drops sharply among users after that point. It could also help Twitter further its monetization efforts by helping them leverage user data to sell premium services to brands and other paying customers via customized marketing missives.
Twitter’s trail of acquisitions this year includes Hotspots.io, a social media analytics tool; Summify, a social media content aggregation tool; and Posterous, a blogging platform that targeted the same basic space as Tumblr, but trailed that company considerably in terms of adoption. These acquisitions seem to be a bit scattershot, but share the thread of providing Twitter with the ability to help its content reach out beyond its own network, and to offer more support to its revenue generating opportunities.
