Barely four months after Twitter acquired the company, Summify has announced that it will be closing up shop next month.
This isn’t entirely surprising given recent developments in Twittervile. Summify’s purpose was generating personalized digests of users’ Twitter feeds, which suddenly became somewhat redundant last week when Twitter announced that it would be sending out Best Of emails to users that compiles a summary of users’ Twitter streams. If Twitter owns Summify and users are receiving digests now from both Twitter and Summify accounts, it’s not really the most resourceful business plan.
Twitter’s decision to begin sending out digests under the company’s name instead of Summify seemed inevitable after the weekly digests started arriving in inboxes. However, it doesn’t appear that the closing down of Summify means that the Summify team will be leaving Twitter; quite the opposite, really, considering that it was the Summify team that developed the Twitter weekly digest. According to the Los Angeles Times, Summify sent out an email to users explaining that the decision to shutter up the service was so that they could focus on the Twitter brand. “We are going to focus our efforts on making Twitter even more engaging and useful for you,” the email said. “While we can’t get into details on what’s to come, we can say that we’re excited and we think you will be too.”
So yeah, less bad news than it really appears to be on the surface. More, the email adds that the Twitter-branded digest will be sent to Summify users automatically so as to make the transition as seamless as possible.
The only snag arising from Summify dissolving completely into Twitter is that, in addition to providing summaries of the micro-blogging site, Summify provided digests of users’ Facebook and Google Reader accounts as well. As you may expect, since this is now a Twitter joint, digests of Facebook and Google Reader will no longer be included.
Summify users who are fond of the daily digest as opposed to Twitter’s weekly digest won’t have to worry about missing out on anything, though. While regular Twitter users will continue to get the weekly digest, Twitter said that those users originally receiving Summify’s digest will be receiving a daily digest from Twitter.
