Summize Blog

Twitter Acquires Summize. Confirmed.

2008-07-15T12:03:19-04:00

It's with great pride that I officially confirm Twitter�??s acquisition of Summize. The rationale for this transaction from Twitter can be found here. I�??ll outline my motivation to sell our beloved Summize, talk about our experience soup to nuts, and recognize the players who made this deal possible.

Summize - A Brief History

Our passion for designing search applications brought us three co-founders, Abdur, Greg, and myself, together back in 2000. After years of building and launching dozens of highly scalable systems serving millions of users, in 2007 we set out to create our own new vertical search engine to help people find opinions and attitudes on the Web.

At Summize, we assembled a small, quirky, but highly efficient and experienced team to build a powerful platform to extract user opinions from blogs and review sites. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases (e.g., when someone says �??nice�?? it isn�??t necessarily in a positive sense). Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine.

In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on trending topics. We immediately embarked on a plan to develop the best Twitter search and discovery application to serve the Twitter community and burgeoning Twitter ecosystem.

Summize �?? Nuts & Bolts

Excited by the potential of a realtime Twitter search, we unleashed Matt Sanford, a web crawling wizard, ops extraordinaire, measurement zealot, and foreign language nut, to shift his attention from blogs to microblogs, and to Twitter in particular.

Matt scurried the raw nuggets of data to Mike, an even bigger nut and a master juggler who to this day claims to have juggled SEVEN balls simultaneously. Mike, who responds well to donuts, just happens to be a C++ and Java guru so he churned out fancy beautified code to parse tweets, thread disparate conversations, and pluck out highly accurate and meaningful trending topics from the Twitter public timeline. The latter task is a really, really tough nut to crack, so it required a helping hand from our nutty professor ~~Adbur~~ ~~Abdir~~ Abdur aka �??El Hefe.�??

Mike pipes the data into our database for Eric, who spends two hours a day either making the perfect cappuccino or walking 28 blocks to find it. But Eric�??s also a self-acclaimed IR wunderkid who can speak in SQL and can invert, convert, revert, subvert, and even evert relational databases and inverted indices to do exactly what he wants. (Ok, I don�??t know what that means, but that�??s exactly the point). He wrung every bit of performance possible to deliver an awesome realtime indexing and query engine. He also implemented hyper-geospatial proximity search during one of his coffee breaks.

Greg, our CTO, the �??Pixelator�??, who frequently confines himself in his basement to align a single pixel to achieve ultimate perfection that only the enlightened can discern, also maintains this riveting blog. He once wanted to rename Summize �??tweird�??, so that tells you a lot about him. I do admit he�??s pretty good at UI design (no surprise here as I taught him everything he knows, including how to manage geeks), assembled all the pieces and served up an elegant user experience for the Twitterati to marvel at.

The bottom line? In a nutshell, Summize nailed realtime conversational search right out the gate.

Summize �?? Twitter�??s Missing Manual

Summize revealed the true power of Twitter and its thriving community. Right from our home page you can �??see�?? what people are talking about at this moment via our trending topics. We tamed the Twitter public timeline by bringing some order to the chaos.

Type any query into Summize to �??listen in�?? on conversations on practically any topic. What do people think about Hancock? What�??s the buzz on Dark Knight or the new iPhone? What site is down?

It�??s now effortless to find your taste neighbors and to connect with like-minded people worldwide. Simply search on keywords that interest you and start following. Experience conferences vicariously and monitor breaking news events as they unfold.

The �??Aha! moment�?? for us was tracking what people are saying about Summize itself. We have been glued to summize.com nearly 24x7 since launch. For the first time we could listen, respond, and engage with our customers in realtime. This revelation was game changing for all of us. There is great potential for companies to get involved with their user base the way we and others like Zappos, JetBlue, Comcast, Southwest have.

Twitter and their investors understood the potential of Summize, hence the marriage between the two startups. There is a perfect technology fit, vision fit, and cultural fit as mentioned in the Twitter blog.

The acquisition enables Twitter to fully harness the core search, filtering, and discovery technology built by the extraordinarily talented Summize team. All five Summize engineers will be joining Twitter. I will continue as a consultant for a short period of time and then move on to spend more time with the family, of course, and eventually sprout another killer startup here in lovely Northern Virginia, a thriving hotbed for Web 2.0 companies (and, as Abdur would say, I am a cereal entrepreneur now).

Close - Personal Note and Acknowledgment

I have a long working relationship with my fellow co-founders, Greg and Abdur, so it is with mixed emotions for me to see them move to California. They have taught me far more than just information retrieval.

Eric Jensen also deserves recognition as a quasi-founder for joining Summize before we secured any funding. Eric is an exemplary technologist and a keen strategist who�??s not afraid to take risk. He�??ll definitely be someone to watch in the years ahead.

I�??m thrilled for the Summize guys and for Jack, Ev, Biz and the Twitter team as they will benefit tremendously having Greg and Abdur in senior technology leadership roles.

I would like to acknowledge our angel investors who saw the potential in the Summize founding team from day one. A big thanks goes to Roger Richter and Tim Webb who are always on my side even when things look bleak. Another big thanks goes to John Burbank, Andrew Seligson, Seth Spalding of Passport Capital for leading our angel round and for listening to my wacky ideas. I�??m also grateful to Jim Davidson, our former boss at AOL, for believing in us despite the obstacles we face out here in the East Coast.

During our travails as a coastally challenged startup we met with many VCs, but one VC firm stood out far above the rest�??Union Square Ventures. There is a good reason why USV is admired by entrepreneurs and the Web 2.0 community�??they are simply the best. In fact, the most important advice I received was from Brad Burnham and it�??s still ingrained in my head, �??Create something simple. Let the market pull you in.�?? Thank you, Brad, and thank you for introducing us to John Borthwick.

John and Andrew Weissman of Betaworks Studio saw the potential in Summize even before we launched our Twitter search. They worked tirelessly to open doors to help us get funding and/or partnering deals. They introduced us to Josh Auerbach, the most amazing deal maker ever and a really nice and funny guy overall, and they re-introduced us to Gerry Campbell, our former colleague at AOL Search (read Gerry's thoughts on the deal). Thank you, John, Andy, Josh, and Gerry. With Summize you have proven your �??Outcubator�?? model.

This post cannot be complete without thanking Fred Wilson. Thank you, Fred for helping to make this deal happen. There�??s a reason why we use �??from:fredwilson�?? as our test query at Summize. If we don�??t see any search results, then clearly �??Something is Technically Wrong�?? in the social media world which requires immediate attention.

And last, but not least, I want to thank our loyal Summize fan base. There were so many Summize evangelists who supported us that it�??s impossible to call out individuals. On behalf of the Summize team, I offer each and every one of you our sincerest gratitude.

Respectfully,

Jay Virdy
http://twitter.com/jayvirdy

WWDC - Live Coverage

2008-06-09T09:59:07-04:00

Today Apple will be hosting their Worldwide Developers Conference WWDC08 and we have the pleasure of providing live tracking of the event via Twitter updates. We believe this is a great opportunity to showcase the power of tracking global conversations and give new users exposure to our trending topics and sentiment technologies. We love the Twitter micro-blogging platform and the opportunity to provide this service to the community. Lastly, a big thanks Twitter for the link.

Local Twitter Search

2008-05-14T11:58:59-04:00

Last night we launched a local operator for our twitter search, enabling you to search within tweets near a location. For example, you can find what people are saying about Obama near:oregon while he campaigns there. The easiest way to find this operator is to use our advanced search page, there you will see an input box with "near this place." Just fill it in with your city, state, zip, etc. along with what you are looking for. Adam Ostrow and Danny Sullivan have already done a great job of reviewing this feature, but we wanted to provide some clarification here about exactly how it works.

For this initial version, we've focused on the "location" field of your twitter profile to determine where you are. Twitter recently released an API allowing this field to be dynamically updated. We rely on the Google Maps API to interpret (or "geocode") this free-text location as an actual place that can be put on a map. We also rely on the level of accuracy they report to determine whether the locations of tweets are accurate enough to be displayed at the zoom level you're viewing. So if you don't see what you expect, especially in China, zoom out!

Brightkite recently provided users an option to update their twitter location. As more Twitter clients integrate accurate location updating into their interfaces, these results will get better and better. For those that already have more precise location data, we accept exact decimal latitude, longitude values in the location field, i.e. "44.145447,-120.583402" You can also put these exact locations in individual tweets, overriding whatever is in your profile by using the picoformat "L:44.145447,-120.583402" Dan Catt wrote a great blog post about how one might automatically update their Twitter profile with exact locations by mashing up existing location API's.

Finally, our local search is available in our API to mash up with your favorite Twitter apps. However, you must provide the exact lattitude, longitude that you are searching from using the "geocode" query parameter, instead of specifying a place name with "near".

What's Happening on Twitter

2008-05-09T16:22:57-04:00

We just did a joint post with R*W*W* on what people talk about on twitter. We found three types of conversations. Status updates of every day activities like "getting coffee" or "check out this post on X" etc. Second, short term memes where many people talk about some event before, during or after it. These conversations are usually short lived, from a few minutes to hours. For example a TV show like "Lost" will have some buzz, before during and after the show airs but drop out of the stream very quickly. Third are long term memes of interest that people talk about for days. Politics or new games are great examples of these longer term thoughts being expressed. Check out the full post.

"What People Say When They Tweet"

Advanced Twitter Search

2008-04-22T22:43:53-04:00

Once you know the basics of Summize's twitter search, you might want to try Advanced Search, which offers numerous options for making your searches more accurate and useful. You can do a lot more with Summize Twitter search than just typing in search terms. With Advanced Search, you can search only for pages with variations of a term, to and from various people and many other variations.

With Advanced Search, you can fine tune your search to the perfect tweets for you:

Contain ALL the search terms you type in
Contain at least one of the words you type in
Does NOT contain specific words you type in
Return results in a specific language
Translate results to English
Tweets to or from a specific user
Links sent to or from a specific users
Special query options {?, :), :( #}
Any combination of the above operators :)

In this post, we will review examples of how to use these advanced search operators. Summize search by default is a "and" search engine. So by default all query terms typed into the search box will be found in the search results. Since that is the default operation, we will not examine that usage here but focus on the new advanced search options.

First, lets look at the "OR" operator. Say we were interested in all tweets mentioning "Obama" or "Clinton" we could issue the following query "obama OR clinton". The Summize query operator "OR" is always uppercase, so the use of "or" is interpreted as just another query term. Now if you wanted to search for variations of search term groups you could use the parentheses and issue the query ""barack obama" OR "hillary clinton"".

NOT

In this release, we added the operator not "-". For example, say we wanted to see all the tweets referring to Clinton but not Obama, we would issue the following query "clinton -obama". Note that our "NOT" operator is a "-".

Language Options

Language filtering is useful for many queries. Say we want to see all the "clinton" posts in Spanish, select the "Show tweets written in:" drop-down menu and select Spanish. Note that our language filtering is not configured in the query box but via search options on the side of the page or bottom of the page for our iPhone version.

One last note, we added the ability to translate all the tweets to English. We will add more options here as we figure out the right way to do that in the UI.

User Specific Queries

Often you need to find twitters to or from a specific user. To solve that we added in the "to:X" and "from:X" to the query language. Lets look at a couple of examples, say we wanted to see all the tweets sent to Techcrunch our query would look like this "to:techcrunch" or if we wanted to see all the tweets from Techcrunch "from:techcrunch".

One of my favorite features is the ability to use search to see all the links I have suggested to others or that have been suggested to a user. For example, say we wanted to see all the links suggested to "Techcrunch" we would use the "to:" operator get tweets sent to that user and then we add our "filter:links" operator - "to:techcrunch filter:links". If we wanted to see the links from Techcrunch we would change the "to:" operator to "from:".

Fun Queries

Summize supports a set of fun queries that allow you to find various expressions not easily found. Add :) or :( to your query and you will find tweets with emotion. Or search for "?" to find questions in tweets, or #word to find specific hashtags, e.g. #haiku.

Combinatorics

We have given specifics of the operators that we support. But the fun part is how you can put them together to get the best results for your needs. Here is a fun query, we want to find tweets to Techcrunch ,that pass on a link, talk about venture capital, have a question, and are happy, "to:techcrunch filter:links ? :) venture capital" So have fun mixing them up and send us feedback.

Twitter Search

2008-04-11T15:57:43-04:00

We have been tracking ways people express their opinions and ideas on the web. One of the coolest ways people are sharing information now is Twitter. There are already a few ways for others to see this data now like Twitter's public timeline. If you want to search it there is already TweetScan that is pretty cool and you should check it out, but not being able to understand the message thread was a problem for us. There is Quotably for that, but search is still needed to find things and bouncing back and forth was a pain. Lastly, all the different languages out there makes it hard to find some things.

So, to that end we pointed our sentiment engine at Twitter's public timeline and a few days later we had a nice search system. Think of it like this: TweetScan + Quotably + language filtering = twitter.summize.com

We have added a few other nice things to it:

Auto update notification: If you keep the page up, it will notify you as new posts come in.
Ability to search by language
Ability to search to/from users
Threaded conversations in search results
Hash tags search

We also have OpenSearch for easy integration into your browsers and an Atom API for integration into your applications.

Hope you all like it and send us feedback.

Thanks,

Summize Team
Abdur