Russian Search Giant Yandex Acquires Social News Startup ‘The Tweeted Times’

Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, has acquired startup venture The Tweeted Times, which enables people to create custom online ‘newspapers’ generated from their Twitter accounts. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but Yandex says it aims to continue offering the social news service and that the entire The Tweeted Times team will be joining the search engine company.

The Tweeted Times was co-founded by Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva, both computer scientists at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and others.

Its users include celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Alyssa Milano and Lance Weiler.

Yandex, which went public last May and is currently valued at just shy of $10 billion, plans to use technologies acquired from The Tweeted Times to boost its search and content services with information from social networks.

This is the third company Yandex has acquired in the past nine months – its most recent purchases include single sign-in plugin maker Loginza and WebVisor’s behavior analysis technology and team.

The Tweeted Times, formerly called Twitter Times, competes with social news curation service Paper.li, which has itself raised over $2 million in financing.

Another company operating in this space is Summify.