The fact that microblogging site Twitter limits communications between users to 140-character Tweets is regarded by some as tacit acknowledgement that information overload is a feature of many social media platforms and can overwhelm all but the most dedicated digerati.
Embarking on a program designed to streamline its website, Twitter launched a redesigned version in December of last year. On January 19, Twitter announced the purchase of Vancouver-based startup and aggregation specialist Summify, something that may not immediately sound related, but is very much so.
The reason for the purchase is Summify’s aggregation products, popular because they work well at summarizing (thus the name) the deluge of information coming into a person’s accounts from various streams, including RSS and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) reader feeds as well as social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Summify sorts all of this information and presents it in a user-friendly, easy-to-digest manner. Facebook and Google+ already have similar services for their users, but Twitter lacked the capability. The purchase price was not revealed, but Summify announced it will begin winding down existing products, and eventually shut them down, as its five employees move to San Francisco to join the Twitter team.
By purchasing Summify and rolling its functionality into the core Twitter website, Twitter in all likelihood hopes to be able to compete with other big social media sites as they try to keep users onsite for as long as possible. Having their preferred news feeds and top stories shared by their friends sorted by relevance and presented in an organized fashion —via the Summify algorithms— should help keep users’ eyeballs on the Twitter website, making it easier for advertisers to reach them.
This might also help to alleviate the problem Twitter has with new users who log on to the site for the first time and give up on the service because they don’t immediately pick up on the whole concept of Tweeting, following the Tweets of other users, or even how to find information that’s relevant.
Hard numbers are notoriously difficult to come by —Twitter claims 100 million active users, while a 2011 Business Insider article put the number of “active” users at under 21 million. But Twitter hasn’t been nearly as successful as Facebook when it comes to converting new accounts to active users. A user-friendly, Summify-style feed could keep these at-risk users interested and on the site long enough to get the hang of things and, Twitter hopes, get hooked. Growth through hard-core tech savvy types is one thing, but to expand beyond that group and gain adoption across a wider demographic requires content that’s friendly, familiar and easy to access.
By having access to a user’s preferred news and content feeds, Twitter would also have the capability to market highly targeted advertising. With 2011 revenue in the neighborhood of $140 million (after growing from 200 employees to 700 in the year), Twitter desperately needs to monetize visitors in order to justify its valuation, which has risen from $1 billion in 2009 to $8.4 billion in 2011. Buying Summify is a logical step toward achieving that goal and putting the company on a stronger footing for its highly anticipated IPO.
