Twitter to Buy Summize, Wants to Perfect its Search
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Rumors are afloat in the blogosphere that Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site that has been over-ridden by issues lately, may acquire Summize, the most popular search engine tool for twitter.
It all seems to have begun when Josh Chandler broke news about the deal on his blog. This was followed by Jason Calacanis announcing publicly about the deal on FriendFeed. Not surprisingly, the entire web seems to be waiting for some official word from either of the two companies.
Twitter has been in the news, a lot, lately. It has received over $20 million in funding so far but has been facing all kinds of problems with its service and the up time. We have covered twitter more than once in the past. With problems looming over its head, quite a few people have moved onto services like FriendFeed or Plurk. Yet, the loyalists have preferred to stick to Twitter. The core issue for all of twitter’s problems seems to be the fact that it wasn’t built as a messaging service. Though twitter has now decided to pick up its skirt and get into damage control, it already launched the twitter status blog to provide the status of its services to its users. By buying Summize, twitter will try to have control over the search part of its service.
Why Summize?
If you ask me, I consider Summize as the only 3rd party tool that performs better than the actual service. Summize has been constantly getting better at what it does. During the recent Apple’s WWDC, Twitter (which must have foreseen the danger to its already limping services) recommend its users to follow the Apple Updates on Summize by placing a link under the Update text box.
Summize is a great tool to follow the conversations and activity on Twitter. A lot of Twitter apps such as Hahlo, Twhirl and others already use Summize’s services. Twitter thinks it would be a good idea to integrate the service into twitter.
This news, however, has shattered my hopes to see Summize being used with other services and not being limited to twitter only. Also, this move by twitter has almost killed other search tools for twitter, like tweetscan.
That makes me think, why cannot twitter build its own search utility?
Summize, which originally began as an academic research project by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury of the Illinois Institute of Technology, has previously come out with other interesting things such as Heatmaps for search. Summize Labs are already working on an experimental ‘Sentiments‘ feature using the Twitter API.
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