Just a week after Twitter’s acqui-hire of Summify, the company has done it again. This time Twitter is grabbing Web security firm Dasient and winding down the Dasient business. Instead of servicing the old customer base, the Dasient team is going to work on Twitter’s revenue engineering team. Wait, what?
You might think that Twitter would be looking to snag Dasient in order to curb problems with spam and other attacks on the platform. Instead, it looks like Twitter is hoping to use Dasient’s team to prep the platform for self-serve ads that might be launching later this year.
Part of Dasient’s product portfolio is targeted at “malvertising,” that is ads from third parties that might be malicious or take users to malicious content.
So, though Twitter isn’t saying much right now, given the note that the team is going to “revenue engineering” instead of security that they’ll be focused on the self-serve advertising platform that’s running behind. According to Twitter in 2010 the platform was going to be coming “next year” but it’s currently limited to a “handful” of businesses after debuting in December 2011.
It’s understandable that Twitter wants to tackle problems that lead directly to revenue, but it’d be nice if they’d focus on curbing Twitter’s spam problem first.
