16 July 2008, 12:54

Twitter acquires Summize

Twitter, the microblogging service which operates over SMS and the web, has acquired Summize, a service for searching Twitter. The announcement comes after Twitter has spent recent months fighting numerous problems. The company has scaled back the services that it provides in an effort to keep the system running

Twitter turned off its tracking features and IM gateway completely in May, and has constantly tweaked functions in its web front end, such as pagination and reply handling. The company also modified the capability of its API including taking the update rate for desktop Twitter clients down as low as ten requests an hour when under extreme load.

During this time, observers speculated on how Twitter was working with sites like Summize, FriendFeed and other consumers of Twitter's messaging, noting that particular partners were being allowed access to a direct feed of Twitter activity while others were shut out. Summize was one of those partners.

In May Twitter raised $15m of venture capital, but had made clear that the problems they were having were in the internal design of Twitter, rather than any lack of physical capacity.

When the Track features on Twitter were disabled, Twitter directed people to Summize as an alternative. In announcing the deal Twitter explained that the relationship had been ongoing for a while; "The meeting with this other startup was largely a formality – we had already fallen in love with both the technology and the team." With a larger team and Summize's stand alone servers, it is hoped that Twitter will be able to get back to the functionality and performance it had when at the start of the year.