BizJournals Portfolio
Jul 08 2008 12:00am EDT

Twitter To Buy Summize

Blaise Zerega says tweet-tweet. Twitter has struck a deal to acquire Summize. Josh Chandler reports, and GigaOm confirms that Twitter, the nascent text-messaging platform will announce in the day aheads that it is purchasing Summize, a popular real-time search engine for Twitter users. Terms have not been made public.

Twitter recently raised a bucket of money, from Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions, the private investing arm of Amazon.com CE) Jeff Bezos.  The purpose of the funding in my interpretation was to help them improve their service and buy some time as they developed a business model.

With Summize, Twitter seems to be doing just that. GigaOm points to Google as an example of developing advertising related to search. My take is pretty similar. In Twitter's case since Summize sits atop the service, the business opportuntity is effectively disentangled from the get-go. There are a thus a variety of ways to monetize the parsing of conversations among the twitterati, from monitoring the zeitgeist, to targeted advertising, to trend watching. All very, very interesting. Tweet-tweet.


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