• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 15, 2013

Twitter's focus continues to turn toward real-time marketing and the data that backs the transition. The company acquired Lucky Sort for its technology that supports text analysis, and data mining and visualization in real time. Noah Pepper, Lucky Sort CEO and founder, announced the move in a blog post and tweet. He explains that a few employees will join Twitter's revenue engineering department, moving to San Francisco to @jointheflock.

Pepper posted a series of videos on Vimeo detailing Lucky Sort's technology. The company will support Twitter's move toward real-time marketing similar to the strategy that supported Oreo campaign during the Super Bowl XLVII. That's when a power outage at the Superdome caused a blackout for 34 minutes and the brand's social media team took advantage of the time out by tweeting "Power Out? No Problem. You can still dunk in the dark."

Twitter also recently acquired Bluefin Labs to jump into real-time marketing. All these acquisitions must have convinced ESPN. The sports network upped the stakes on its partnership with the blue bird and to distribute highlight clips from major sporting events. The Wall Street Journalreports the network "plans to sell ads that will run inside the video clips, and marketing sponsors will commit to buying from Twitter a minimum value of "promoted or paid Twitter posts to circulate their pitches."

Lucky Sorts and Bluefin are not the only companies to get plucked by Twitter. On May 9, Ubalo CEO Jacob Mattingley and CTO Ian Downes wrote on the Ubalo Web site that the team will join Twitter. The company, known as an easy to scale big data computing service, was privately held, backed by Harrison Metal, until a few days ago.