Twitter Buys Email Marketer RestEngine

Twitter has acquired email marketing firm RestEngine, the start-up announced last week, the latest in a series of acquisitions aimed at building up its analytics and customer engagement tools.

RestEngine is aimed at developers of applications that run on social networks such as Facebook, helping them to create emails that keep users engaged with the application.

Social apps

The firm, founded two and a half years ago, has worked with social applications developers including CrowdStar, RockYou and Ustream.

Twitter will acquire RestEngine’s technology as well as hiring its staff, although Joe Waltman will not be joining Twitter, preferring to pursue entrepreneurial projects, according to a report by TechCrunch. The company’s other three staff members are co-founder Josh Aberant and developers Soren Berg and Mike Lin.

RestEngine’s development team said the move would offer them the ability to work on bigger projects.

“With our customers, we’ve iterated on our social marketing automation platform while defining a new set of best practices for this brand new world of outbound social marketing,” RestEngine said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to now focus our email skills and marketing automation know-how on a much larger scale at Twitter.”

Terms of the acquisition, which reportedly closed in late April, were not disclosed.

Recent buys

Twitter in April acquired Hotspots.io, a start-up focused on developing analytics tools for social media.

In January the company acquired Summify, a social news aggregator founded by former Google and Microsoft interns Mircea Paşoi and Cristian Strat. Like RestEngine, the tool sends periodic emails to users, in this case aggregating news articles shared from their social networks based on relevance and importance.

Last week Twitter admitted it had been hit by a data breach that saw thousands of usernames and passwords posted online. However, the company said the majority of accounts affected were spam or duplicate profiles.

How well do you know the cloud? Take our quiz.