Yes, Twitter bought Summize

Twitter has indeed acquired Summize, a nifty search engine built specifically to index Twitter posts, TechCrunch reported Tuesday along with a video of Twitter founder Evan Williams talking about it.

The news follows sporadic rumors that were accompanied by both shaky confirmations and shaky denials. An under-the-radar blogger, Josh Chandler, reported the news first; GigaOM's Om Malik was the first big name to "confirm" it.

Some logistics, as reported by TechCrunch: five of Summize's six employees will become Twitter employees, minus founder Jay Verdy, who will depart the company for "a new project." Naturally, no one's naming numbers--though the Silicon Alley Insider puts it at around $15 million. The transaction was, reportedly, mostly in stock.

So what does this mean? Basically, that Twitter won't have to build its own search engine. Simple enough.

This post was updated at 10:27 a.m. PT.

[tech_junky48]

Why is twitter buying apps instead of servers so that their website runs more than, oh, 65% of the time?

[konterkariert]

This makes much sense, because Summize offers great Sentiment Analysis technology.

With Summize Twitter is now a gold mine for Web Data Mining and Web Monitoring. Ford could ask Twitter, how their products do. If the people like their new car or not. Ford could pay Twitter to monitor all their products and get alarmed, if the twitter crowd of early adopters talks bad about a particular auto.



Twitter + Summize is like ICQ + Nielsen//NetRatings on steroids



I will make a deeper comment on the relationship between Twitter and Summize, here, later
http://konterkariert.tumblr.com/post/42355329/twitt er-starts-web-data-mining-with-summize