Twitter Confirms Summize Acquisition

Posted on July 15, 2008

Twitter has confirmed rumors from earlier this month that they would be acquiring the Summize search engine.

Last month, Twitter had a very special date in New York City. We met with another startup, had lunch at the famous Shake Shack, and spent some quality time together in Union Square. The meeting with this other startup was largely a formality-we had already fallen in love with both the technology and the team.

Keeping up with interesting news and people you care about is one dimension of Twitter, but what if you need to find out what's happening in the world beyond your personal timeline? How do you find out about updates from Mars? What do people think of the new Will Smith movie? Providing tools for filtering all the real-time information coursing through Twitter has long been part of our vision.

We introduced a feature called Track close to a year ago because we recognized filtering as a key component of the Twitter experience. The folks over at Summize discovered Twitter and significantly improved on this idea of filtering and search. Twitter and Summize met last month to discuss a more formal relationship.

You can see the Summize search now on Twitter at search.twitter.com. Summize.com now redirects to this domain. A ZDNet post wonders what will happen to other Twitter search tools like Tweetscan. It remains to be seen if the deal will help Twitter with its stability issues. They have been more stable lately but the Fail Whale still makes appearances - especially it seems when you are checking direct messages.

It feels right that a microblog service has its own built-in search tool. Plurk, a rival microblogging service, also has a built-in search tool here.

Update: Silicon Alley Insider says Twitter paid $15 million for Summize in a cash and stock transaction.