Twitter to shut down Summify following acquisition

Twitter has acquired social aggregation service Summify for an undisclosed sum, two years after its Romanian-born founders relocated to Vancouver.

 

Summify, which uses social data to create personalised news digests, was founded by Romanian-born tech entrepreneurs Mircea Pasoi and Cristian Strat.

 

Two years ago, Pasoi and Strat relocated from Romania to Vancouver after being accepted into Bootup Labs, a Vancouver-based seed fund and start-up accelerator.

 

In addition to Bootup Labs, Summify has raised seed funding from investors including Accel Partners, Rob Glaser, Stewart Butterfield, Steve Olechowski and Boris Wertz.

 

In March 2011, the company launched its email summary product, acknowledging Twitter.

 

“As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realised it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale,” it said in a blog.

 

Now Summify has been acquired by Twitter for an undisclosed sum. In what appears to be a talent acquisition, the Summify team will relocate to Twitter’s head office in San Francisco.

 

“We will be disabling new account registrations immediately and we will also be removing some features,” Summify said.

 

By removing these features, Summify insists it will be offering “a more streamlined service” as it makes the transition into the Twitter fold.

 

Features that have been removed include profile pages and influence pages, the auto-publish feature, and the ability to make summaries public (all summaries will now be private).

 

“We will keep the email summaries for a few more weeks, but at some point we will shut down the current Summify product,” the company said.

 

After starting as an email service, Summify extended to an iPhone app.

 

The Summify service focused on giving users less news, instead of more, by sending users daily email summaries of only the most important stories.

 

It selected stories based on the number of times each user’s contacts had recently shared them on Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader, and how many times they had been shared on these networks globally.

 

“Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time-efficient manner,” the company said.

 

“We are joining Twitter’s growth team and will continue to explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.”