Twitter has announced that it has acquired Summize, an interactive search tool and simultaneously launched its own search engine search.twitter.com. The new search tool has the exact same look, feel, and functionality of Summize, but with Twitter branding. The deal is said to be worth $15M stock and cash and depending upon how long the team stays at Twitter they could benefit from Twitter eventually getting acquired too.
The current explosion of social networking will soon result in most websites having a social networking component. As a result the big step in social networking isn’t going to be who creates the next MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube, but who creates a website or software to consolidate all the data that all these networks produce.
Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos is the latest investor in Internet communications firm Twitter, according to the company, as the much-watched firm announced its latest funding round in a blog post. San Franscisco-based Twitter, which runs a popular instant-messaging service.
Popular mobile IM and VOIP service Fring just launched an Application Programming Interface that could bring some awesome new applications to mobile phones around the world. Fring offers peer to peer mobile VOIP and allows users to chat, call, and transfer files from mobile to PC or mobile to mobile, completely free of charge, using the mobile devices’ Wi-Fi connection.
Twhirl is a desktop Twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform. It connects to multiple Twitter and Friendfeed accounts, pops up notifications on new tweets, shortens long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd), cross-posts updates to Pownce and Jaiku, post images to TwitPic, searches tweets using TweetScan, filters timelines, and is localized to English, German, Italian and Spanish.
Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding ). Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month. The site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites.
