Finding A Perfect Match

Last month, Twitter had a very special date in New York City. We met with another startup, had lunch at the famous Shake Shack, and spent some quality time together in Union Square. The meeting with this other startup was largely a formality—we had already fallen in love with both the technology and the team.

Keeping up with interesting news and people you care about is one dimension of Twitter, but what if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline? How do you find out about updates from Mars? What do people think of the new Will Smith movie? Providing tools for filtering all the real-time information coursing through Twitter has long been part of our vision.

We introduced a feature called Track close to a year ago because we recognized filtering as a key component of the Twitter experience. The folks over at Summize discovered Twitter and significantly improved on this idea of filtering and search. Twitter and Summize met last month to discuss a more formal relationship.

CEO Jack Dorsey makes it official

We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.

Better Together

Summize is a popular service for searching Twitter and keeping up with emerging trends in real-time. Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand.

A sketch of search inside Twitter

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. We will be adding search and its related features to the core offering of Twitter in the very near future. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to access search.twitter.com—there’s no need for a Twitter account.

Our Commitment

Overall service performance remains our first and foremost priority. Adding five extremely talented engineers to our team serves to further this goal. The addition of search to our existing API creates an opportunity for more diversity within projects developed on the Twitter platform. We will continue to support existing applications built on the Twitter API and look forward to innovative new approaches.