Summify

» see summify.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There is a way for a product to die that has nothing to do with whether it worked. The buyer wants the two people who built it, pays for the company because that is the legal way to hire them, and switches the product off on the way in. Summify is a clean instance. It was not failing, it had money in the bank and investors who could pick winners, and it was closed five months after being bought by one of the largest social networks on earth.

Mircea Pasoi and Cristian Strat were Romanian, former Google and Microsoft interns, and they moved to Vancouver in 2010 for an accelerator called Bootup Labs. The project went in as ReadFu and came out renamed Summify on 20 march 2010. In march 2011 they closed a seed round with Accel Partners, RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser, and Flickr's Stewart Butterfield in it, which is a respectable list of people to have convinced.

What it did was one thing, done narrowly. It read the feeds you already had on Twitter and Facebook, worked out which handful of links your own network was actually converging on, and mailed you a short digest once a day. Not a river, not a folder with an unread count climbing into four figures. Five or so stories in an email, and then it left you alone until tomorrow.

i was not a customer and by 2011 my reading was already sitting in Google Reader with the unread counter that eventually taught everybody the same lesson. Summify's premise is one i recognize with hindsight rather than memory: the problem by then was never finding things, it was that subscribing to a source committed you to all of it forever.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The ranking was the whole company. Anybody can build a digest, and half a dozen products did. The hard part is deciding which five links out of two thousand belong in it, using signals from a network where the loudest accounts are usually the least useful. Summify weighted by who in your own graph had shared something rather than by raw popularity, so a link three of your colleagues had posted beat a link three thousand strangers had.

The delivery choice was the other good decision, and it looks better now than it did then. Email is not a feed. It arrives once, it does not accumulate a badge, and finishing it is possible. Everything built in this category since has quietly rediscovered that, which is why the surviving descendants of this idea are all newsletters.

~ bought to be closed ~

Twitter announced the acquisition of Context Media Technologies, the company behind Summify, on 19 january 2012. The terms were not disclosed and nobody pretended the terms were the point. Both founders relocated to San Francisco to work out of Twitter's headquarters, on the discovery and timeline problems that Summify had been solving on a much smaller scale.

The service began dying the same week. New accounts closed immediately and features started coming off. The full shutdown came on 22 june 2012, five months later, with existing users given the interval to stop depending on it. Twitter never shipped anything that was recognizably Summify, though its later attempts at a digest, the highlights mail and the algorithmic timeline, are aimed at the same target and were built by a team that now included the two people who had hit it once already.

~ the long tail ~

The category kept trying. Zite and Prismatic and a long line of successors all tried to rank the internet down to something a person could finish, and all of them are dead. The ones that lasted longest were the ones that gave up on ranking and paid a human to choose. That may be the actual finding buried in this grave.

summify.com resolves in 2026 and serves an unrelated site about charity projects. There is no continuity with any of the above, just a lapsed domain picked up by somebody else. The product itself left nothing recoverable, no archive and no source drop. It was two years of work whose only surviving output is two engineering careers.

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