I had heard the rumors, and now it's confirmed: Twitter has acquired Summize. But I don't think that Summize search is the answer to Twitter business model question.
[from Twitter Buys Summize For About $15M: Gets Search - And Maybe A Business Model by Peter Kafka][...]
And, if you're feeling generous, Summize might well help Twitter solve its business model problem, too. Twitter users wouldn't stand for ads sold into their tweets, or on their Twitter pages themselves. But there are a couple of companies we can think of that have done well by selling ads on search pages.
If you start putting ads into Twitter's search results, there is no reason you could put ads wherever. I have ads in my Gmail and I accept it because the service if free.
Alternatively, if Twitter started to treat my Twitter stream as a combination of blog and RSS feed, why can't I put my own ads there? I have ads on my blog; so why not just institutionalize the ads, and share the revenue with the Twitterers?
This aquisition makes so much sense.
Twitter combined with Summize is turning it into a gold mine for Web Data Mining and Web Monitoring for global corporations.
Or Twitter could hyper target their ads to Twitter Messages with positive feelings about products, protecting marketeers to advertise their goods near negative sentiments related to their company. Peer39 is just starting this technology.
Read more here in my blog post concerning this deal
http://konterkariert.tumblr.com/post/42355329/twitter-starts-web-data-mining-with-summize
Posted by: Christoph Möller | July 15, 2008 at 02:22 PM