Twitter Acquires Social News Summary Tool Summify

By James Ashworth

LAST week, social networking site Twitter bought Summify, a small start-up that aggregates links shared by users’ friends on social networks.

The product had seemed to be popular and useful among social networkers, but it has been announced that Summify is soon to be shut down.

 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 in Romania and based in Vancouver before extending to an iPhone app. One of its more unique features was that it focused on giving users less news instead of more, by sending them daily email summaries of only the most important stories. At the end of each day’s list it stated, “You’re done!”

 The service picked its 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.

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

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