Twitter Acquires Summify--Then Closes It

Twitter has purchased news aggregation startup Summify. The announcement, posted on the Summify blog, was bittersweet for Summify, since the acquisition also marks the closing of the popular service.

One user wrote the following in the comments section of Summify's blog post: "As someone who receives over a dozen such daily newsletter, Summify is by far the best. The acquire is great, congrats, but PLEASE don’t shutter the service!"

According to a post on the Summify site, the service will begin scaling back operations immediately and will stop completely in the near future. Since March, the Vancouver-based company has been sending users regular email summaries of the five most important news stories of the day based on which links were most popular on their social networks. In July, an iPhone app was released, which garnered 10,000 downloads in 14 days, according to the The Vancouver Sun.

According to All Things D, the major draw of Summify was the fact that it actually decreased the amount of news users saw per day.For people overloaded by content, this was a breath of fresh air. Reporter Liz Gannes noted, "At the end of each day’s list it said 'You’re done!'"

Summify was started by Mircea Pașoi and Cristian Strat, a team of two self-described "Romanian hackers and entrepreneurs." Both men, who are in their early 20s, turned down offers from Facebook and Google in order to move to Canada to start Summify, reported The Vancouver Sun in September.

Pasoi and Strat, along with three other members of the Summify team will be moving to California to join the Twitter Growth team in San Francisco.

According to Mashable, Twitter has not disclosed how the Summify acquisition would impact the microblogging site, although a representative from Twitter told Mashable that Summify "will help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news."