Apples purchase of Topsy this past week caught many analysts and social data experts by surprise. This was an unexpected move on Apple's part as they have not been successful or aggressive in their social data strategy. Apple hasn't had much to say on the acquisition and while $200 million is the reported purchase price it's a relatively small purchase by Apple standards. Wall Street liked the deal and Apple stock got a bump up on the news last week.
Comments from CEO Tim Cook in 2012 indicated that social expertise and strategy were on the agenda for Apple. At the all Things D conference he stated that Apple planed to integrate with other social networks rather than build its own and Apple needed to be social, because it doesn't have to own a social network.
I don't suspect that Apple will use Topsy's database of 450 billion tweets dating back to 2006 to launch a social network. That ship has sailed and unless Apple could creat a new value proposition for that space they are best left to leveraging social data not creating it.
Apple has a vast database of customers and mountains of historical content use data, purchasing data and behavior data that they could enrich with social data to creat better and smarter product offerings.
I would watch for the following to be powered by the Topsy acquisition.
Datasift and GNIP remain in the market as competitors to Topsy and I wouldn't be surprised to see another acquisition soon.