The Next Web

Summize will form Twitter’s second core product

Written on July 8, 2008 – 10:10 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

While most Europeans went to sleep, Josh Chandler from the U.K. started off a rumor that would keep the U.S. Web 2.0 bloggers busy during their day. He said, based on “100% reliable” source that Twitter will acquire the conversational search engine Summize. This tweet spread through Twitter like a virus and featured on all the big American technology blogs - ending with GigaOM confirming the deal. Now it’s time for an European tech blog to shine a light on this possible and exciting acquisition.

First, let’s ease the mind of people who are afraid Twitter will infect Summize with its scalability problems. Yahoo! frontend engineer and designer Nate Koechley explains that “Twitter’s already on the path to health and Summize is immune from Twitter’s disease, so it should all work out fine.”

That being said, it’s the logical way to go to celebrate that Twitter will finally get a search function. Due to its many blog battles with Friendfeed, the latter always took some points on offering the ability to search. With the acquisition of Summize, Twitter will be able to block this punch, and hit back harder.

But there’s this one thing that really gets me excited. Now and then, I also lose my faith in Twitter - with the downtime and disabled features and all. But every time I visit a tech conference, I regain my believe in the microblogging service - as the tool enables the audience to connect with the speakers or panel. Over the past two years, Twitter has become THE discussion and feedback tool for almost every tech conference out there.

But there always was one thing missing: Twitter wasn’t displayed on the screen as a different tool functioned as a back channel - like Slandr, Tweetscan.., and Summize. With this upcoming acquisition, Twitter can evolve to a standard in conference and events interaction that doesn’t need the help of a mash-up. Together with microblogging, Biz Stone and Evan Williams will then have two core products.

I hope you like that post!

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