

Twitter to buy Summize.com - joshchandler
http://joshchandlerblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/twitter-to-buy-summizecom.html

======
samosman
He who thinks twitter is acquiring summize for the technology is foolish.

~~~
j2d2
Care to elaborate?

~~~
Xichekolas
I'd guess he means they are buying the people, not necessarily the tech.

------
jonknee
Seems to be an odd purchase. They already have access to all the data, how
hard is it to write a simple search layer?

~~~
thorax
I'm always a little surprised at comments like this regarding a
software/technology acquisition. This sort of thing is rarely about whether or
not they "can" reproduce the technology, but how much value it would be for
them to have versus the opportunity costs of working on it.

Right now, Twitter is flush with cash from their recent funding. They need to
continue their growth and their best engineers are obviously working to keep
the site alive rather than designing new features.

As such, it makes lots of sense to add features through acquisition given
their circumstances. This particular feature has been tried and tested to work
with their existing infrastructure. Because it builds on their API, they also
don't have to worry about the design breaking during their internal
scalability refactoring.

This deal makes lots of sense to me and I would expect to see more of this
from them as they fight to keep aloft.

~~~
vaksel
its search not rocket science. Unless the acquisition is in the low 5 digit
figures, it's probably a waste of money. Acquisitions are usually about
getting the seller's user base or some unique piece of technology/patent,
which is not the case here.

~~~
thorax
5 digit figures? How are you getting that? How many full-time engineer
"months" do you think Twitter would need to pay to get something as scalable
as Summize? Who will test that it's ready to go live before the patience-thin
Twitter user base?

How much money would be spent on the scalability testing to see if the service
can handle an Apple WWDC without crippling the rest of Twitter?

I think you're greatly underestimating what they did with Summize. It's not
rocket science, but there's real (and tried-by-fire) value there for Twitter.
Summize didn't get $750k in angel funding to sell to someone in low 5 digits.

We're talking about live search over a medium completely made up of small,
frequent text messages. Real-time searching increases Twitter's value as the
instantaneous information source it has become. They don't have a lot of
strengths to build on, but that's definitely one of the most valuable things
Twitter has to offer and Summize augments that.

No brainer: buy Summize for a 2-4 million, add their search tools, get some of
their engineers helping in the scalability problems, improve the API based on
their feedback, have some of them continue working on their lab prototypes,
and keep growing.

------
shimonrura
Summize is a trivial feature given Twitter. But if you think about it, Twitter
is also a trivial feature given Summize. Summize is WAY more reliable. Let's
hope that the technical leadership goes in the opposite direction as the cash!

~~~
Raphael
Bummer. You made me realize that I'll never get to search Plurk, identi.ca,
etc. with Summize.

------
kajecounterhack
Why bother purchasing a search layer when they can't even scale
right...they're not prioritizing

~~~
jrockway
They are probably worried about what happens if they continue to not be able
to scale. If they add search, perhaps they can charge money for people data-
mining tweets, and get some cash to continue to focus on scaling.

Right now Twitter needs to keep current users excited, because we're all
really tired of Twitter's downtime. The only thing keeping us on Twitter is
the other Twitter users. If a critical mass of users leaves, Twitter becomes a
distant memory. They are probably trying to avoid that by adding features that
don't kill their current database.

Just speculation, of course. Sometimes it's a good idea to assume that they
are making a good move instead of thinking that you're clearly smarter than
them and they are "teh fail" for doing this.

------
aditya
Unsubstantiated?

~~~
tbeseda
pics or it didn't happen

