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Summize Blog


Twitter Acquires Summize. Confirmed.July 15 2008

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 tr

WWDC - Live CoverageJune 9 2008

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.

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CIKM 2008 Call for PapersMay 22 2008

The CIKM 2008 deadline is almost up. This year is going to be great with the venue being in Napa Valley. I thought our call for papers on our web site would be interesting to check out.  Also, I am running this years Industry track so if you have something interesting for the conference please submit it.

Final Call for Papers and Information about CIKM 2008
ACM Seventeenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
                                       CIKM 2008

October 26-30, 2008, Napa Valley Marriott Hotel & Spa, California, U.S.A.
WEBSITE:  http://www.cikm2008.org/

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • Corporate supporters
  • Keynote speakers
  • Conference themes and Topics
  • Paper submissions Information and  Important dates (Abstracts due: May 27, 2008)
  • Industry day
  • List of accepted workshops
  • Student travel support
  • Information about hotel, travel, and Napa Valley
  • Organizing and Program Committee

  CORPORATE SUPPORTERS

Gold: Information Retrieval   Facility, Microsoft, SearchMe.com

Silver:   Advertising.com, Ask.com, eBay Research Labs, Yahoo! Research

Bronze: Justsystems Evans Research

Supported by ACM SIGI




Local Twitter SearchMay 14 2008

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

What's Happening on TwitterMay 9 2008

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"

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