How many times has this happened to you? You find a good network, platform, app or API to grow your digital IQ, performance, and insight. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, there it is, the “service is ending” announcement. In the case of Topsy, some would argue that the handwriting was on the wall two years ago with the $200 million acquisition by Apple. Earlier this month, without warning or explanation, according to a report in Search Engine Land, along with a less-than- intriguing tweet and the speed of a redirect, Topsy made its transition to good services now gone. R.I.P. Topsy, many marketers will long remember you as the social analytics tool of choice.
We’ve searched our last tweet.
— Topsy (@Topsy) December 16, 2015
A quick read of cyber obits, of sorts, and it becomes quite clear that Topsy’s demise was inevitable. Here are a few excerpts:
The Next Web:
Few free services provide access to Twitter’s firehose data for analysis, so Topsy’s loss is a big one — it’s one of only four providers with the ability to collect and sell Twitter’s data.
Read the entire article here.
TechCrunch:
Topsy was a popular choice for those who analyzed social media back in the day, particularly since it was one of handful of services that gained early access to Twitter’s full data firehose. But, following the acquisition, many users jumped ship to other services in anticipation that its new owner had other uses for it. That turned out to be correct.
We first started hearing rumors of Topsy’s impending closure a year ago, when the company stopped allowing premium users — those who paid for additional analytics and services beyond the basic offering — to renew their accounts. Now that all paying customer accounts have expired, it makes sense that the service itself is bowing out.
Read the entire article here.
9TO5Mac:
Apple acquired Topsy Labs in December of 2013 for upwards of $225 million. When the acquisition was originally revealed, many speculated that Apple would use Topsy’s data from social media and integrate it into services like iTunes Radio, so it’s more than likely that some of Topsy’s technology is being used behind the scenes for Apple Music and Beats 1.
Read the entire article here.
Many will miss Topsy as these social tributes indicate:
Many will find alternatives to Topsy and here are a few suggestions:
- Charlie Williams provides a comprehensive list of more than ten resources in the article, Twitter Search Alternatives & Tools. You can read it here.
- In Topsy Officially Shuts Down, But Today’s Choices of Social Analytics Are Huge, Lisa Froelings, writing for Small Biz Trends, provides an overview of four companies that offer similar functionality with some bonuses. You can read it here.
- From the Quora community forum:
Rest in cyber peace, Topsy. It was a great eight-year run.
Will you miss Topsy? Feel free to share your expressions (of sympathy) in the comments section of this post.
GB O’Brien
LGK Principal
For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest.
Topsy shutting down is a particularly large loss because it was one of the few services that still had Twitter share counts after Twitter turned them off. Our hope was to combine the use of both Topsy and ShareTally.co manually while praying that Warfare Plugins gets Twitter counts working in their popular Social Warfare plugin.
It is obvious from what many have written about Topsy shutting down and the comments that most didn’t realize what a gold mine it was. You could see who retweeted any particular content so you could connect with them. You could skim the tweets and retweet the best of them. And although the counts were often erratic and inaccurate – at least they were something.
We can search URLs in Twitter’s advanced search to see the tweets and retweet them from there and connect with those who retweet our content. We’ll be doing a lot more of that now.
Topsy was also a fast, efficient way to determine which of multiple hashtags was more popular.