Led by Oxford graduate Duncan Greatwood, the company named Topsy provides access to the “firehose” of all tweets generated on Twitter. The service also indexed major social networks, including Facebook and Google+. Apple’s deal to buy Topsy for $200 million followed the acquisition of PrimeSense, an Israeli technology company, for about $350 million.

This purchase suggests that the tech giant is planning to expand its influence in the social media field, where it has previously struggled to make any impact after the failure of its Ping social music service. The company confirmed the purchase, saying that they buy smaller technology firms from time to time without disclosing their purpose or plans.

The industry experts believe that Apple’s purpose in purchasing the firm could be to improve its iAds service which experienced poor sales. Or the company might want to improve its general Internet services functionality while trying to compete with Google and Microsoft over shifts from hardware towards software and services. It is known that Apple lags behind Google in web services, where the latter has obvious advantages in areas like local data, maps, and voice search.

Apple may also intend to use the new service for indexing applications and to improve search using its Siri voice control system, or in the App Store, where users find is difficult to find the right app as the catalogue expands.

Topsy was founded six years ago and has since created a complete searchable archive of 450 billion tweets sent over Twitter. The service also added other analytics instruments to make itself useful to businesses. The companies are now able to buy pro services in order to tailor their social efforts.

Topsy had raised a total of $35 million in venture capital up to September 2013. Its co-founder and chief technology officer said a few months ago that the amount of data being created on Twitter plus Facebook was so far more than the data being created on the rest of the Internet. As you can see, social data has become the bigger public corpus. Topsy has also built indexes that could be applied to Facebook, and it had archived every public Google+ post as well. The company’s essential power is considered as being able to evaluate “sentiment” around tweets and in users’ comments on social networks.