Yesterday, Twitter announced that they are acquiring the Vancouver-based social new aggregator Summify. Summify, which was founded in late 2009 as ReadFu, summarizes the stories that are shared on the popular social networks and other news sites. Summify quickly sorts through the hundreds of stories that are shared across a user’s network, identifies the most important stories, and delivers a personalized digest to the user via email.
Although the Summify founders Mircea Pasoi and Christian Strat originally founded the company in Romania, they moved Summify to Vancouver two years ago. A Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat that the acquisition terms will require the five Summify founders and engineers join Twitter in San Francisco:
“Cristian Strat and Mircea Pasoi have created a product that curates the best and most important stories in your Twitter timeline and Facebook newsfeed. Cristian and Mircea and their team of three engineers will join our Growth team and explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.”
The executive team posted the following message on the Summify blog:
“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. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.”
After making the announcement, Summify immediately stopped accepting new subscribers and registrations and has already removed the following functionalities:
- Ability to make summaries public
- Profile and influence pages
- Auto-publish feature
Although the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, it appears that the acquisition may have been primarily motivated to secure Summify’s talent.
[Sources Include: Summify & VentureBeat]
