Twitter acquires Canada’s startup news aggregator Summify

21 Jan 2012

Twitter, the social microblogging site yesterday acquired Canada's Summify, a startup news aggregator that summarises content of users social media accounts and delivers a daily one-page summary via email to a user's mobile handset.

"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 realised it's the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale," Summify said in a blog post.

Summify, which was founded in Romania by Mircea Pasoi and Cristian Strat, two former interns of Microsoft and Google, but recently moved to Vancouver, gets into users social media accounts and delivers s a daily summary of the top stories their friends have shared across social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Its investors include Accel Partners, Capital West Partners, co-founder of FeedBurner Steve Olechowski, and others.

Twitter, which has nearly 500 million members, did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but Summify will immediately shift its operations to Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco.

As part of the deal, Summify will stop accepting new account sign-ups and eliminate several features and eventually shut down its service completely.

Existing Summify users will have regular access to their newsletters and will still be able to get their social news from the website and on the iPhone, but Summify is stopping ''public'' newsletters option, as well as profile pages, influence pages, and the auto-publish feature.