A rumor pops its head out this morning that Twitter is negotiating to buy Summize, a search engine allowing users to dig through tweets on Twitter. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to appreciate the quality snark emanating from David Fry via Twitter rival FriendFeed: One company with no revenue buys another company with no revenue and whose existence depends on the first company?
Yes, that appears to be the case, according to either an unknown British ginger kid with seemingly no connections to anybody in Silicon Valley, or Jason Calacanis, whomever you prefer to get your early rumors from. We’re inclined to say “Nice scoop, Josh.”
Mike Arrington finagled a source saying the two companies have been in merger talks for a couple of weeks, and perhaps the same spies spotted a posse from Summize haunting Twitter’s San Francisco HQ.
Om Malik has his own sources who say a deal is in the works and could be announced as early as next week. Asking price? Well, it seems it would have to be less than the $15 million Twitter recently raised and is not, it would seem, spending on infrastructure.
Alright, that was off-sides. VentureBeat says that thanks to less downtime, Twitter is on the mend with users after a noticeable plunge in mid-June. For those following, though, buying Summize isn’t so far from reasonable. During that lamented downtime, Twitter advised loyalists to make use of Summize to get their feex (Twitter fix), while they tightened some bolts.
Leslie Poston isn’t very optimistic about it:
Should Summize truly be acquired by Twitter, I see it losing its usefulness in a hurry as it, too, starts to go down for longer and longer periods of time. Worse would be if it got integrated into Twitter as a feature. You know what Twitter does with useful features, right? It turns them off every other day to “help” scale. Remember the With Others feature? Yeah, I miss that also.
Malik, though, has made sense of it, in a Google-to-AdSense kind of way:
Summize has come-up with a clever way of peering through Twitter’s vast data stream and finding out what’s hot, where and how. The results are essentially keywords – topic, person or location based – and thus can be used to show contextual advertising next to the pages that show these results. Summize, has thereby developed an ability to monetize conversations without being intrusive.
It seems true enough that the side services developed from Twitter not only add value to the platform by legitimizing it, but the side services themselves become valuable. murdok’s Twellow.com, built on Twitter’s API, was a hit before it even officially launched. Both services seem to answer the old “what’s the point?” question by adding much needed functionality to an already buzzworthy, but incomplete, platform.
