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.
summify_logo

Apple iPad News Reader Zite Sold to CNN for Just Over $20 Million

Zite, the magazine-style reading app for the Apple iPad, has been sold to news giant CNN for $20 million to $25 million.
zite

When Media Giants Attack! Cease-and-Desist Letter to News Reader Zite Claims All Kinds of Copyright Damage

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app. The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the copyright violations action, which you can read all about after the jump.

Google Gets a Like Button: Users Can Recommend Search Results With +1

Google today will start rolling out a social search feature it is calling +1. The product is much more limited than sharing tools from other services like Facebook, Twitter and Delicious, but since it will influence Google search results, it’s significant.

A Digital “Magazine” With One Subscriber

A new iPad app called Zite makes the news-gathering process a lot easier. The app crawls over half a million Web domains to find specific reading material that would be of interest to users, according to their social network and online reading behavior.
Zite

Zite Launches (Even More) Personalized iPad Magazine App

As demonstrated by all the fuss around apps like Flipboard and Pulse, people like the idea of of a touchable digital magazine. And today another one is launching, called Zite, which boasts a carefully honed personalized article-picking algorithm.

Early Adopter: Connect Your Personal Data Pipes Together With Ifttt’s Digital Duct Tape

APIs make the personal Web go round, but for years now, dealing with them has been the domain of the programmer. Now, San Francisco start-up ifttt is hoping to use super-simple design to allow ordinary users to bend pieces of the Web to their own will and create connections between previously siloed services. No coding required.

Flipboard Caves to User Demand; Adds RSS Feeds (And Flickr and Web Previews)

Flipboard, the social content display application for the iPad, is releasing an update tonight that adds users’ No. 1 most-requested feature: RSS feeds.

Google Buzz Isn’t Exactly Humming Along

Google retooled its Buzz social-networking effort after receiving a lot of criticism about its privacy settings. Katie Boehret looks at how Buzz compares with other social-networking sites.

Almost Famous Update: Now-Out-of-Beta Brizzly Hires Facebooker and Translates Tweets

Brizzly, the Web-based Twitter client from Thing Labs, covered in Almost Famous two weeks ago, begins public beta today. In addition to opening its “expanded” Twitter interface to the world at large, the start-up is offering an on-the-fly translation tool for foreign tweets. And it has hired former FriendFeeder and current Facebooker Ben Darnell.
brizzly-logo