summize

Chief scientist, two board members exit Twitter

Defections at Twitter are mounting. Not only is Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury the latest ranking technologist to resign from the San Francisco-based company, but two key board members are also stepping down.

Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet, two of Twitter's earliest investors, will be leaving at the end of the month. Twitter confirmed this to Peter Kafka at AllThingsD. In early August, Twitter announced that it closed an $800 million venture deal--the largest in history--led by Yuri Milner's Russian venture capital firm DST Global. This brings Twitter's valuation to $8.4 billion. DST also invests in Facebook, … Read more

Search box starts popping up on Twitter

The industry buzz is that searchability is one of Twitter's killer features, and indeed, it looks like the microblogging service is starting to put it more front and center. Some Twitter users have reported that the toolbar in the right-hand corner of Twitter.com is now displaying a search box and access to a list of "trends"--fast-rising terms and topics that members are chatting about. It looks like the company is either testing it out or doing the gradual rollout thing.

I unfortunately don't have access to it yet, so I can't take a … Read more

Monitter is three times better than Twitter's search

If you're a big user of Twitter search (formerly Summize), you'll probably like Monitter three times better. That's because it lets you search for not just one word or phrase in the Twitterverse, but three at one time.

Leaving it open in a tab or window turns your browser into something like a stock ticker, with new Tweets fading in as long as they've got the word or phrase you've typed in. Each previous search is also kept as an RSS feed right below.

In addition to its simple one-page presentation, blog owners can drop … Read more

Yes, Twitter bought Summize

Twitter has indeed acquired Summize, a nifty search engine built specifically to index Twitter posts, TechCrunch reported Tuesday along with a video of Twitter founder Evan Williams talking about it.

The news follows sporadic rumors that were accompanied by both shaky confirmations and shaky denials. An under-the-radar blogger, Josh Chandler, reported the news first; GigaOM's Om Malik was the first big name to "confirm" it.

Some logistics, as reported by TechCrunch: five of Summize's six employees will become Twitter employees, minus founder Jay Verdy, who will depart the company for "a new project." Naturally, … Read more

OMG! Twitter might buy Summize

Over the past day, a flurry of tech blogs has bloomed with rumors that microblogging service Twitter might buy Summize, a nifty Twitter search engine.

The juicy news was first reported by a virtually unknown blogger, Josh Chandler. And with all the chatter, you'd think it were the next AOL-Bebo. That's because the world of tech blogs (and this one is no exception) has a remarkable tendency to ignore the fact that Twitter is still largely a foreign concept outside the digitally astute and that there are plenty of avid Twitter users who still don't know what … Read more

Image: Facebook hits a teeny-tiny outage, but Twitterers still freak out

Social network Facebook experienced what appears to have been a very brief server outage on Tuesday morning--15 minutes, tops--but looking at Twitter keyword search site Summize, you'd think it were cause for mass panic:

Twitter is dying. Summize and Twiddict are trying to keep it alive

Today is the day of Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC keynote. Very exciting! But it's a sad day for Twitter fans who are watching the service, already suffering from weeks of intermittent problems, collapse under the load of people who are tying to use it to talk about the Stevenote.

There are at least two initiatives for people, like me, who can't just walk away from our old friend: Summize and Twiddict.

Summize is a Twitter search engine. It can read what's happening on Twitter and is a bit easier to deal with than the intermittent Twitter.com. … Read more