Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Twitter Acquires Social Summary Tool Summify

Twitter has acquired Summify, a small start-up that smartly aggregates links shared by users’ friends on social networks.

Sadly for me, as it’s a product I find super useful, the Summify service will be shut down, according to a blog post describing the deal this morning.

Instead, five members of the Summify team will be joining Twitter’s growth team in San Francisco to help work on its products “to explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.”

Summify had started as an email service and extended to an iPhone app. One of its more novel features was that it focused on giving users less news instead of more, by sending users daily email summaries of only the most important stories. At the end of each day’s list it said “You’re done!”

The service picked those stories through a combination of how many times each user’s contacts had recently shared them on Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader, and how many times they had been shared on those networks globally.

Summify disabled new registrations today and dropped some features in anticipation of shutting down the service at an unspecified date.

Summify, which was started in Romania and based in Vancouver, had raised seed funding from investors including Accel Partners, Rob Glaser and Stewart Butterfield.

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There was a worry before I started this that I was going to burn every bridge I had. But I realize now that there are some bridges that are worth burning.

— Valleywag editor Sam Biddle