After a longstanding relationship with the company, Twitter has decided to acquire Gnip, a leading provider of social data. Numerous deals hammered out over the last few years have allowed Gnip to sell access to a realtime firehose of activity on Twitter and the full historical archive of public tweets. Gnip has played a crucial role in collecting and digesting our public data and delivering the most essential tweets to partners, Twitter said in a blog post announcing the purchase.