Twitter takes Summize: But why are we celebrating?

15 July 2008 Ken Yeung View Comments

Breaking News! Twitter acquires Summize and adds it to its growing tools of Twitter applications.

Wait, why is this so great? It’s good that Twitter has acquired Summize and it definitely complements the services offered by the mobile-text messaging giant, but should we heap praise onto a service that seems to have disabled many of its services? Why haven’t they spent their money on re-enabling many of their lost services, like instant messaging? What about pagination? They quickly added it and then took it away from us so now if you’ve missed part of the conversation, you had to use Summize to track it all.

For Twitter to acquire Summize, my question is who was going to stand in their way if they didn’t jump on this opportunity? Was Plurk or Pownce thinking that having a site that searches Twitter for conversations will be a worthwhile investment? Maybe it’s because Twitter thought that the more popular Summize became, the more expensive the acquisition would be later on.

Definitely the search engine and conversation tracking solutions offered by Summize should help Twitter a great deal, but before we heap praise on added services to our beloved tweets, let us not forget the sacrifices that we’ve had to make over the past few months and the annoying whale we’ve had to watch over and over again as those crazy birds try to lift it off the ground.

TechCrunch has posted the breaking news on their website and it’s a good acquisition/partnership since Twitter found some stability in all the heavy usage during the Twitter outage of 2008. Moreover, as the founders seek to provide real-time information, then what better way to track topics and conversations that are appearing as breaking news happens than with 140 text character dialogues.

So go on, Twitter. Enjoy your moment in the spotlight. You have five new engineers that can hopefully help bring eternal stability and renewed service to the Twitterverse. But until that happens, I see this as getting you one step closer, but it’s nothing to toot your own horn with.