Twitter acquires Summify : Further signals Twitter move into publishing
Twitter has acquired Summify, a service that creates a daily summary of the most relevant news from your social networks and delivers it to you by email, web or mobile.
From Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb, reporting on Twitter buying Summify:
Summify picks out key stories from a Twitter stream by scanning the user’s contacts and social networks. It looks at shares of a story on Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader, and it considers the story’s popularity within the user’s own network as well as globally. The constant stream of Twitter updates can be too much to digest, so Summify built a way to automatically discover the most interesting stuff.
Josh Lynch, one of LexBlog’s project managers, introduced me to Summify last year. Josh thought it a pretty cool way to stay abreast of news and developments you’re interested in. Rather than saying, here’s the subject I want content on, Summify delivers what you’re interested in because people in your social network have tweeted the content or shared it on other social media.
I’ve enjoyed summify because by recognizing a face or name in an email, I feel compelled to take a peak at the content. I haven’t enjoyed the inane auto-tweets from people calling out the names of people who have ‘Summified’ their news.
Summify is led by a group of Romanian transplants who moved to Vancouver in 2010 to become part of a business incubator. Summify feels their vision is closely aligned with Twitter’s, thus the acquisition.
Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.
Changes are coming to Summify immediately, per Mitchell.
Starting today, Summify has disabled new account registrations and some features. Summaries can no longer be public and profile pages and influence pages are gone. Summify used to auto-tweet for a user after generating a summary, mentioning the people whose links were featured, but this feature is now disabled.
Existing users of Summify will still get their private summaries via email and the iPhone app, but “at some point,” the team says, “we will shut down the current Summify product.”
I blogged last week about Twitter entering the news publishing business with Twitter’s hiring of a BBC sports social media editor in order to cover the 2012 London Olympics.
Twitter’s acquisition of Summify further signals a move by Twitter into the publishing space. Publishers, and the editors they employ, curate content. Through curation, a publisher enables its readers and users (in the case of the Web) to discover relevant information, news, and commentary.
Twitter has become the oxygen fueling news distribution. News produced by citizen journalists, via blogs and coverage via Twitter itself, as well as news from the historical mainstream media. But with so much content gushing from the Twitter pipe, we need curation to facilitate discovery.
Tools like Summify add a powerful ‘human layer’ to the technology Twitter is developing to curate content.
Don’t expect Twitter or Summify to exist long term in their present form. Expect Twitter news and information sites automatically displayed based on your interests – on both desk tops and mobile devices. That atmosphere will enable Twitter as a publisher to derive greater ad revenue.
It’s all good for you as a attorney and law firm, if you’re making effective and knowledgeable use of social media. Networking, relationship building, engagement, and reputation enhancing opportunities are only going to grow.