Twitter reports on their blog that they acquired Summize, a search engine that indexes twitter posts.
As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone puts it:
“The folks over at Summize discovered Twitter and significantly improved on this idea of filtering and search..”
Techcrunch reports that Twitter hired 5 of the 6 employees, all of them are engineers. The original founder and CEO moves along to a new project. The Summize API will be merged with that of Twitter and integrated under the Twitter brand. Twitter is expected to add search and related features in the near future.
Nobody mentioned numbers, but Silicon Alley Insider reports a total of $15 million, both in stock and cash. (read more)
This makes much sense, because Summize offers great Sentiment Analysis technology.
With Summize Twitter is now a gold mine for Web Data Mining and Web Monitoring. Ford could ask Twitter, how their products do. If the people like their new car or not. Ford could pay Twitter to monitor all their products and get alarmed, if the twitter crowds talks bad about a particular auto.
Twitter + Summize is like ICQ + Nielsen//NetRatings on steroids
I will make a deeper comment on the relationship between Twitter and Summize, here, later
http://konterkariert.tumblr.com/post/42355329/twitter-starts-web-data-mining-with-summize
That is just incredible! I had no idea Twitter had that kind of money. And such a smart move to make this acquisition. Developers will be a lot more motivated to build exciting new services around the Twitter platform now they know that there is a possibility of getting bought by Twitter.