Last month, the Twitter data provider Topsy was acquired by Apple. No one seems real clear on what Apple tends to do with their new acquisition, but we can tell you what they won’t be doing: continuing to provider our Twitter data. They’ve informed us this service is being turned off early next month.

Thankfully, we’d already started looking into switching to Altmetric.com as our Twitter data provider. Not only are they still, you know, in business–they also offer significantly improved coverage of most research products.

However, Topsy’s exit does have implications for you, our users. First, although our twitter tracking for scholarly articles, preprints and datasets has improved thanks to Altmetric.com, we’re losing our ability to track tweets on other kinds of products like github and slideshare. Second, we need to disable our Twitter and WordPress Blog products: they relied heavily on Topsy data. Tweets and blog posts will stop displaying on profiles in the next few days.

We’re disappointed about losing these features. We know you loved those features and we did too.  As many folks have pointed out, one of the key challenges of altmetrics is securing persistent, open access to data (the same is true, for that matter, of bibliometrics in general). So we’ve planned for this sort of thing, but it’s still no fun.

The good news is that we’re still committed to these features, especially getting great impact metrics for users’ blogs and Twitter feeds. We’re looking into several replacement approaches now, and we’re optimistic. A lot depends on how much demand we get, so we can decide where to prioritize these. As always, if it matter to you, let us know; we’ll listen.