Twitter has purchased the popular social news aggregator, Summify, which will close up shop and be absorbed by the micro-blogging service.
Summify is a start-up that aggregated links shared by users' contacts on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
Based in Canada and started by Romanians Mircea Pașoi and Cristian Strat, the service will start scaling back its operations immediately, according the announcement on the Summify blog.
“Roughly two years ago, we moved from Romania to Vancouver after being accepted into Bootup Labs, an awesome start-up incubator. It has been an incredible journey, with lots of highs, a few lows, and many product iterations,” says the Summify team.
“In March 2011, we launched our e-mail summary product and we've been blown away by the response ever since. Many of our users tell us we found a magical solution to a truly unsolved problem.”
The founders say their vision for the service was to connect users with the most relevant news for them, in the most efficient manner.
“As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realised it's the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.”
All new account registrations for Summify have already been disabled, along with a number of features such as making summaries public and creating profile pages.
Summify also says the service will be completely shut down in its current form in the coming weeks.
Don't go
The Summify team will join Twitter's Growth team, and say they will “continue to explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news”.
Another user says: “There's got to be a way to keep the service up and running. This is so disappointing and is a real ugly move for your users who rely on Summify and would have come along as you grew and monetised it. So disappointing.” (sic)
Responding to outpouring of concern from users, Summify has said: “Some of you have expressed concerns about the product being shut down. We appreciate your support and enthusiasm.
“At Twitter, we are going to focus our efforts on making Twitter even more engaging and useful for you. While we can't get into details on what's to come, we can say that we're excited and we think you will be too.”
Connecting content
Twitter is remaining tight-lipped as to how exactly the Summify technology will be incorporated into the service, or whether the deal is purely a talent acquisition.
The micro-blogging site unveiled a major redesign at the end of last year, in an effort to make it easier for users to find and connect with the most relevant content.
At the time, Twitter said the redesign was “just the beginning”.
“We now have a framework in place that we will quickly build and iterate upon to help users connect with whatever is meaningful to them.”
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