It’s hard to avoid news of Twitter. You could be perusing web hosting reviews and learn about the antics of the world’s biggest most powerful microblogging network. The latest news is that in an effort to combat spamming, Twitter has made a new acquisition, purchasing the startup security company Dasient, which specializes in malware protection software for businesses. Or at least it did. Effective immediately, Dasient will no longer take on new clients and will focus only on Twitter’s revenue engineering. One has to imagine this is a significantly more lucrative contract for the company, which was founded in 2008 by Neil Daswani, the ex-Product Manager for Google, along with several other industry juggernauts. From its inception, Dasient has been working to tackle “web-scale security problems” that many say are rampant on the Internet.
Since 2010, Dasient Security has been aggressively launching ad campaigns to attract businesses to the idea of investing in anti-malware measures that can safeguard ad networks and marketing agencies. This campaign apparently worked, as the company was able to attract the attention of Twitter, which is beefing up its infrastructure in a variety of ways and evidently wanted a better platform for advertising security.
This is just the latest in a series of acquisitions by the social media giant. In 2011, Twitter took over Whisper Systems, a mobile security company, and in early 2012 they got another startup, the social news aggregator Summify. That’s two security companies in less than six months. Clearly, Twitter is looking for robust protection as it begins to upscale its revenue flow. Its latest financial move was to begin asking for $120,000 per promoted trend. Twitter, as opposed to Facebook, has also been aggressively pursuing self-service advertising, which allows them to net a bigger diversity of advertisers.
Do these moves come ahead of an IPO announcement? According to Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costolo, the latest moves do not signify a rush toward a public offering. While most tech rumors put Twitter going public in 2013, at which point they should be generating approximately $260 million a year, Twitter executives seem more focused on acquiring companies and services that can help them shore up security issues and improve their latest features. The company also seems to be headed in a direction that will change it from a merely microblogging platform into a powerful social media company with broad functionalities such as branding and advertising. According to many analysts, Twitter is positioned to reap the benefits of advertising revenue much more effectively than big brother Facebook.