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Last month Twitter acquired social media analytics company BackType. Much of BackType's technology (such as ElephantDB and Cascalog) are already open source, and this week Twitter announced that BackType's Storm will be open-sourced at the Strange Loop conference in September.

Storm is a Hadoop-like system, but instead of running MapReduce "jobs" that eventually end, Storm runs never ending "topologies." It can be used for continuous computing, processing streams of data, etc.

Twitter just announced this morning that it has acquired innovative social media data analytics service BackType. The BackType team will provide data for publishing partners of Twitter about how much traction their Tweets are getting, how they are converting to other key performance indicators and other information.

Some Twitter ecosystem partners will likely call this a betrayal of Twitter's public calls to build analytics services on its platforms, instead of Twitter clients, after Twitter acquired favored client software providers. Personally, I see this as another failure of the social media economy to sustain providers of more than crude self-interested promotion and broadcast.

Today we're looking at seven companies that announced investments raised over the past 24 hours. In the cutthroat world of startups and great ideas, which company will significantly affect our lives? On today's list we've got a site that makes it even easier to order in a pizza for dinner (as if we needed further prompting to make such a decision!), a site to help us find a job (for just an hour or a lifetime) and the company behind the super addictive Angry Birds app. We've got many more promising companies to consider. Tell us, readers, which of these companies will shape the world?

We first told you about ElephantDB earlier this year in our article Secrets of BackType's Data Engineers. But we didn't link to the GitHub repo, which has been making rounds in the blogosphere for the past couple days.

As a refresher, ElephantDB is an distributed database created by BackType to export data from Hadoop and serve it into analytics applications, APIs, etc.

Conversations around blog posts now often happen offsite on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Sadly, a lot of plugins that try to bring these conversation back to the blog end up being somewhat useless, as large numbers of retweets can easily overshadow the more interesting tweets. Twitter search engine BackType just launched a major update to its search engine and a new WordPress plugin that aim to combat this problem. Starting today, BackType will filter out uninteresting tweets from its search results and its widgets.

Ten years ago the ClueTrain manifesto said that "markets are conversations" but today a more pertinent statement could be that conversations are becoming markets - or that there's a market for monitoring conversations. A whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online.

The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future?

Announced alongside BackType Connect today, BackTweets is a fresh new take on a Twitter search engine: It un-shortens and catalogs URLs sent via Twitter.  We believe that, even though BackTweets was created to fill a piece of BackType Connect's total conversation search offering, it will also become an important player by itself and we are glad to see it has gotten its own clean look.

Conversation tracking service Co.mments has announced this morning that it will cease operations at the end of the week, one month before its 3rd anniversary online. The service was at one time reviewed favorably compared to similar services that have gone on to be acquired or funded by investors. A respectable number of users quickly bemoaned the decision in comments on the company blog.

Thousands of services are launched online every year and only a small number of those prove to have as much longevity. Today's new paradigm trailblazer will often be tomorrow's dead-end hassle for its developer. Such is the nature of a rapidly iterating web and such is the fate of Co.mments.