Update: Full transcript of video interview is here.
It turns out those rumors last week were accurate. Microblogging site Twitter has acquired the Summize search engine, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams confirmed to me. The size of the transaction is not being disclosed, although the transaction price was paid “mostly in stock.”
Twitter has also hired 5 of the 6 Summize employees. Founder and CEO Jay Verdy will move on to a new project.
The five Summize employees joining Twitter are all engineers, adding to the twelve engineers that currently work at Twitter. Summize CTO Greg Pass will become Twitter’s top tech guy as Director of Engineering and Ops.
The deal has been discussed for some time, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams told me earlier. The companies had a term sheet in place when Twitter partnered with Summize in June to help them keep the Twitter platform stable during the Apple iPhone 3G Steve Jobs keynote. The deal was closed in the last week.
John Borthwick, a partner at Summize investor Betaworks, was also an investor in Pyra Labs (Blogger.com), which Evan Williams co-founded in 1999. In other words, the companies were already kissing cousins.
I spoke with Williams over the weekend at Foo Camp about the transaction and other Twitter issues. The video is below. We’ll post a full transcript later today.
Congrats to the Summize guys and also to twitter. This can only mean a better service from twitter in the future. ‘Payed mostly in stock’ don’t know about that one though, especially for the Summize founder.
Smart move, Summize is a great tool. This is just what Twitter needs. Now if they can just keep the service online more consistently.
> Twitter co-founder Evan Williams confirmed to me.
And to the rest of the world: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/0.....match.html
Didn’t know Summize was in Potomac Falls. Cool. Wonder if they will get stay.
This is such a perfect match. Now that Twitter has been stabilizing more and more, I am looking forward to a ton of new features soon.
This is a perfect acquisition by Twitter. Now they just need some scalability experts. Congratulations to John Borthwick, Summize and Twitter teams.
ahahaha “mostly in stock”. Does nobody remember that scam from Web 1.0?
Seriously, why is twitter such a big deal? $20 mil in funding? ?!
Sweet!
great move by twitter, hopefully this will help them from getting crushed by identi.ca and friendfeed and everyone else gunning for their spot.
good to see that twitter will be expanding its services with a cool search engine… I think this is a great move for the future growth of the company and will allow users to very easily access people updates based of keywords, etc…. I would say, however, that I don’t know how valuable it is to look at people’s old updates, but for new updates this works well.
Innovation is key… http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
very cool. summize is a great complimentary product to twitter. I use it all the time. Glad they are getting engineering support as well.
Summize is a very useful application for both individuals and businesses. It automatically refreshes as well so you do not need to go back to the site to find the latest tweets for any given keyword.
Congratulations.
PS: What was the sticker price?
Congratulations to both the Twitter and the Summize teams. The Summize team worked hard to build a useful, speedy and reliable piece of the web, lets hope their hard work continues on twitter itself!
What’s so special on Summize?
Why did Twitter bought this company? Are they too stupid to release an own search engine?
I mean Summize also only takes the date from Twitter directly…
@technosailor - sounded like the core team (less CEO) is relocating from VA and NY to SFO with one straggler in VA that comes to SFO later
@Tobsen - I was wondering that myself; I’ve come to one conclusion (assumption): Twitter needs to expand its team, so they bought a company with engineers who are very comfortable using their API. Probably cheaper & faster than hiring new folks…
Yeah, I too wondered about why they wouldn’t simply do this in-house, but I think they have their hands full with hunting the infamous fail-whales.
Revenue Model???
Who brings a baby to Foo Camp.
Apparently the Summize guys are related to AOL search in some way, so not only is the product already built I would think they sort of know what they’re doing.
Revenue model will be based on highly targeted search which the former AOL guys at Summize will help a ton with at Twitter. Obviously I think the fit is great.
If i was one of the investor, I’d want stock as well.
I love twitter. Its hell of addictive. I like its minimal features and it works on my ancient GPRS handset. I like it more since A-lister whiners and probles want us 2 use friendfeed. Twitter guys u rock and here is wishing u all the best.
The second half of this interview is really the most interesting part, where Evan talks about how giving Twitter’s entire data feed to partner/competitors like FriendFeed (via XMPP) makes him “nervous” and his thinking on how Twitter might one day make money. He doesn’t know, and he’s honest about it.
But it’s also clear that if Twitter fixes its reliability issues, it will have a lot of different options open to it on the revenue side. Charging for leads to commercial users based on consumers who opt in to follow a businesses’ Tweets/offers is an interesting one.
twitter going down a lot reminds me of ebays problems when they mike wilson built their site. they went down frequently but had such a steadfast audience they found other ways to keep themselves entertained or busy until ebays site came back online and then they went back to business as usual. that is how i feel about twitter. its has gotten so big that unless it really screws up people will continue to use it and i dont think it will really screw up with the summize engineers on board now. congrats to everyone.
twitter going down a lot reminds me of ebay’s early problems when the site couldn’t handle the load and was knocked offline a lot. They brought in Mike Wilson to fix PO’s code and they still had problems. in the early days, they went down frequently but had such a steadfast audience they found other ways to keep themselves entertained in other forums or busy until ebay’s site came back online and then they went back to business as usual. that is how i feel about twitter. its has gotten big enough that unless it really screws up people will continue to use it and i dont think it will really screw up with the summize engineers on board now. congrats to everyone.
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 crowds 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.co.....th-summize
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 crowds 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.co.....th-summize
Is it my imagination or is Ev Williams a BIG IDIOT?
Seems like a moron to me. Biz isn’t much better.
Revenue? Get real.
Could they even think they could evaluate TECHNOLOGY from anyone???
AS IF!
Congratulations to both the Twitter and the Summize teams.
Its a great move by Twitter, now we will have much better clients and functionality like tagging and channels can be provided directly.
Great move
Great interview. I think this one and the one that Scoble did are excellent PR for Twitter.
I can’t say I get why they didn’t just build their own search. I also don’t see how they paid $15 mil in stock + cash. They should have had a lot of leverage here considering that Summize runs completely off of Twitter. Twitter could’ve cut off Summize at any second. Plus they could’ve replicated it internally and then cut summize.
To the previous commenter who said it was to acquire the team… I’m not sure that justifies a whole acquisition… there are plenty of high caliber guys they could’ve hired with that kind of money.
(#33) you assume Twitter is smart!
We know that they are not, and that Biz is not very Business.
We know Evan is really a dumbass too…
Who is taking care of these kids?
Freaking dummies. Amazing.
I think that Twitter has more options to capitalize their service than FF. But as this article also points out, history tends to repeat itself. They talk about how Friendster open up the doors for MySpace and Facebook, etc.
Twitter buys summize… so now summize will use failwhale as well?
@GSMdaze for a bunch of “freaking dummies” they seem to be doing okay. Twitter is only growing more and more and getting more reliable. You just sound like a hater.
@Boris — Why would Twitter piss off a bunch of people who are supporting their platform? It’s all about having smart people who know what they are doing on your team.
Congrats to Twitter on the acquisition. Summize should’ve been part of Twitter since the beginning.
I’m very glad Twitter has stabilized their API (to 100 requests per hour) before this acquisition went through.
@BJ I agree with the basis of your contention, but I can’t imagine giving $15 million of cash + stock to acquire the team and search functionality.
Part of me feels like Twitter is such a tech blogosphere darling that no one is questioning this move. The other part of me feels like there is something way deep beyond the surface that will make sense later on.
The point is at face value this deal makes no sense to me.
Congrats to the guys at Summize.
This move will bring more startups in the twitter ecosystem.
More innovation to follow in this area.
-Nikhil
Summize search engine? I’ve never heard of it before. Well anyway, whether it’s being bought by Twitter or not, I don’t care. Google will still be my love!
Summize being such a key complement to Twitter, it’s good to know that the two companies have tied the knot.
Congratulations, and thanks to Michael for the reporting.