Tweet Crunch

Twitter Gets People Power

Posted on 16. Jul, 2008 by John in Latest News, Twitter

There were rumblings about Twitter buying Summize over a week ago and yesterday it was officially announced. The transaction details are not being disclosed although it’s thought that the deal was partly paid for with Twitter Stock, they are also bringing over 5 out of the 6 employees from Summize, the founder and CEO is not joining up as he is working on other projects.

Overall service performance remains our first and foremost priority. Adding five extremely talented engineers to our team serves to further this goal. The addition of search to our existing API creates an opportunity for more diversity within projects developed on the Twitter platform. We will continue to support existing applications built on the Twitter API and look forward to innovative new approaches.

Summize has been the number one realtime search platform for Twitter for a while, with a excellent UI it’s own API and a bucket full of features they showed off it’s potential by teaming up with Twitter earlier this year to cover the Apple Developers Conference.

The potential for summize is huge and a really smart deal on Twitters side, for those who don’t use the service simply type any query into Summize to “listen in” on conversations on practically any topic.  What do people think about a film  What’s the buzz the new iPhone?  What site is down?. For example I had updated a Vista machine I use the other day with a whole bunch of security updates, and when I started the machine up the next day It was giving me a strange error message.

What I would normally do is to go and type that error message into Google and as usual you would get shed loads of adverts telling you your system was infected and you must download my software now to fix the problem, or you would find the information you needed, However looking through summize with the same error message, it gives you a timeline of when other people started getting the problem and how they found a way to fix it, and sure enough it worked and it’s fixed, thanks to people power, Twitter and Summize.

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. We will be adding search and its related features to the core offering of Twitter in the very near future. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to access search.twitter.com—there’s no need for a Twitter account.

Moving back over to the deal, here is an interesting interview with Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter by TechCrunch about the deal, API’s and their revenue model.

People are now looking at the Summize deal and trying to find the potential revenue models that this would bring in. One idea would obviously be to place web ads in the search results, maybe not with Google Ads but by creating a ad platform with the companies that are already on Twitter and are advertising such as Woot.com etc… for the moment though I think we can enjoy an ad free Twitter service as they look to improve the overall performance of the site and address some of the downtime issues. The future’s bright, the future’s Twitter.

Some more interesting views on the Summize Deal

Silicon Alley - Twitter Buys Summize and maybe a business model

Gigaom - Inside the Twitter-Summize Deal

Tags: Apple, Evan Wiliams, summize, Twitter, woot.com