Summize Likely Acquired by Twitter
Well placed rumor has it that microblogging service Twitter has acquired search engine Summize. Jason Calacanis appears to have made the first public statement about it, though it may have been blogger Josh Chandler as well. We'd put less stock in were it not that Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is getting positive signals on the deal and would not likely have pulled the trigger on the story were it nothing but a fleeting rumor.
Summize is one of the most interesting services on the web today, both for its feature set and its history. Started as an academic research project by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Summize is today headquartered in Virginia. Chowdhury was the AOL employee who posted 650,000 AOL customers' search queries for researchers to analyze in 2006 - kicking off a storm of debate about data privacy that still rages today.
What Summize Does
Summize calls itself a tool for "conversation search," and that's a well deserved tagline. The service's automatic translation tool uses Google Language tools to translate non-English Twitter messages into English with a single click. It's access to the Twitter XMPP API enables it to offer on-screen notification of any new search results as they become available. The Summize search API has become the must-have Twitter search tool for all the best 3rd party Twitter clients and services.
The experimental "sentiment analysis" appears to have been the original intention behind the application's development. We wrote here about Summize almost a year and a half ago when it was focused on combining sentiment analysis and heat maps with search results. Summize also had a short lived deal with the Huffington Post, where story tags were accompanied by related search results from Twitter. Model startup GetSatisfaction is using Summize similarly.
Enter any search term and Summize will analyze the emotional nature of recent discussions of that term on Twitter. It's unclear how well developed the sentiment analysis tool really is, Chowdhury has also long worked on spam control and duplicate detection.
Market Context
This is the second case of a micro-service related to Twitter being acquired by another startup. When video conversation startup Seesmic bought leading Twitter client Twhirl in April, it was probably a deal that gave Twhirl's single developer a job more than it was anything else. It was a groundbreaking deal none the less. For Twitter itself to buy an angel funded project like Summize (TechCrunch reports Summize has $750k in the bank) is a radically different deal.
While cynics are concerned that the deal will lead to Twitter breaking Summize (!) we think it will instead lead to Twitter's more rapid iteration of advanced features - something Twitter has needed almost as badly as it's needed increased up time. Core development of Twitter has crawled in recent months as everyone there has appeared to focus on fixing the service itself. As enthusiastic Twitter users, we're excited to see some more features enter the mix.
For now we await official comment from members of either company. Allen Stern has a nice video of a presentation about Summize given by the company, over on CenterNetworks.
Comments
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Twitter needs to move fast to prevent service problems from driving users to alternate tools such as FriendFeed and identi.ca.
Having raised $20M, resources are not Twitter's problem. Rather, the issue is time required to fix performance issues and therefore regain users' trust. This morning during a podcast interview, Phil Wainewright from ZDNet told me that SaaS success/failure is all about trust. So it is in this case.
Right now, users trust Summize, so if the rumor is true then it's good for Twitter.
Posted by: Michael Krigsman | July 7, 2008 4:09 PM
if it's true, it's a short term goodwill play
Posted by: allen stern | July 7, 2008 4:41 PM
Allen, a short term goodwill play for probably a couple million dollars at least? I don't think so, I think you're just kidding - right?
It's really interesting to see Twitter (and Friendfeed) content become part of the wider search ecosystem. I've noticed that twitter and FF content has begun to rank highly for some google searches I've done - and it's being indexed very fast. Summize is a more niche search play, but it enables Twitter users to find contextual content, topic-focused content etc -- ie Twitter content is expanding beyond the 'what are you doing now?' personal stuff that it started out as. Now Twitter content is recognized as being potentially useful and more than social. It's even faster than blogs, which had previously usurped MSM in terms of relevant search content.
nope, not kidding marshall - i think it's not a good move but would suffice in the short term.
hey! looking at your mybloglog - summize is here now :)
Posted by: allen stern | July 7, 2008 4:54 PM
This past few days I've been seeing friendfeed show up in Google alerts for my name and a few keywords I'm monitoring. These services are becoming more and more relevant by the day.
Posted by: Paul Short
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July 7, 2008 4:57 PM
Are you suggesting that he will do something similar related to the Twitter DB?
Posted by: Alex Popescu
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July 7, 2008 5:25 PM
nope, I'm justing sayin' it's interesting!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 7, 2008 6:29 PM
Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinteresting.
Posted by: l0ckergn0me
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July 7, 2008 6:30 PM
yeah that was the long tail analysis "there were 21,011,340 unique queries out of 36,389,567 records in the data set." - It was just another IIT dude fingering the system..no biggie :)-
Posted by: Peter Dawson
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July 7, 2008 6:43 PM
It would be a marriage made in heaven. Definitely a winner in my book.
Posted by: Karoli | July 7, 2008 6:55 PM
Twitter buying Summize would be a plus in my book, since this means Summize's database of tweets will be under Twitter's control and I have less of a worry about a third-party's use of my data.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the purchase was partially motivated by Twitter's desire to address the business implications of handing out the stream of public updates.
Summize also seems to be perfectly positioned for any 'data mining' that people may want to do with Twitter data. I can see companies and their PR firms paying reasonable sums of money for reports that analyze the general sentiment of tweets about their product over time. Current Summize searches on their web site only return results a page at a time.
Since Summize is primarily a read-only archive, it's no doubt designed to handle heavy querying. Perhaps therein lies the key to unlocking Twitter's monetization puzzle.
Posted by: mdy | July 7, 2008 8:28 PM
@Michael Krigsman Twitter will never go away because it has a cool name and people already use like a verb....
Posted by: Micah Peterson | July 8, 2008 5:42 AM
This is a smart move by Twitter. Especially if Twitter uses Summize to bring back some sort of track-like functionality and maybe even use Summize for a reply page backup service.
Summize has been able to stay up a little bit better then Twitter has been and seems to be more stable then Twitter so if nothing else Summize could be the "Dugg Mirror" of Twitter.
Posted by: Michael | July 8, 2008 10:11 AM