Twitter acquires Summify, as if tweets aren’t summed up enough

Twitter is grabbing more talent, this time out of Vancouver. Summify, a social news aggregator, will shutter its technology and be absorbed by the social network starting today.

“Cristian Strat and Mircea Pasoi have created a product that curates the best and most important stories in your Twitter timeline and Facebook newsfeed,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat in an e-mail. “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.”

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Summify’s product truncates your social media and various reader feeds into hourly newsletters showing you only the information it believes you are interested in. The company’s technology looks at who you follow, what your friends like, and where you get your news to decide what content is most compelling for your newsletters. These little bites of social information can be accessed through e-mail, your browser or your iPhone.

The product direction seems to fit well into Twitter’s overall vision. Twitter too is in the business of truncating. That is, taking what would have otherwise been 200-word posts and convincing people to state the opinion in 140 characters.

“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,” said the team in a blog post.

But becoming part of Twitter’s “Growth team” means Summify is closing down its aggregator to focus on more tweet-friendly projects. According to Summify, subscribers believe the company “found a magical solution to a truly unsolved problem.” A solution Summify says it is “streamlining,” or cutting down little by little, for an easier transition into Twitter.

As of today, new registrations are being cut off, while existing Summify users will have regular access to their newsletters. Summify is also ending “public” newsletters option, as well as profile pages, influence pages, and the auto-publish feature. E-mailed summaries will be first to go in a couple weeks. Subscribers will still be able to get their social news from the website and iPhone notifications.

As a sign of a good product, customers are already beginning to complain in comments of the blog post. Many are happy for the company, but are sad to see their resource fall away. One commenter described the feeling as “shocked.”

Twitter would not comment on how the technology will be used, or if this was purely a talent acquisition.

Summify was founded in Romania and moved to Vancouver after being accepted into incubator Bootup Labs. The company employees will be relocating to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Investors include Accel Partners, Capital West Partners, co-founder of FeedBurner Steve Olechowski, and more.

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