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Why the Summify shutdown pissed me off?
Before I left on my trip last week TechCrunch reported that Summify announced that it was being bought by Twitter. I had started using Summify for a few weeks now and it was my goto place in the mornings to catch up on popular news. Earlier, I used to weed through my Twitter feed but having a service that filters and curates content is wonderful. So, while going through the TechCrunch story I started thinking…Wow, that is awesome for the founders and the VCs that have invested in the company.
If Twitter can use the Summify engine and build the service into Twitter then that would be fantastic.
I read some more and noticed…
This sounds like a talent acquisition on Twitter’s part — in other words, the main purpose of the acquisition was probably hiring the Summify team. Some of Summify’s feature have been immediately disabled, it’s no longer accepting new users, and in a few weeks, Summify says it will shut down the current product entirely. Meanwhile, the startup will be moving from Vancouver to San Francisco to work out of the Twitter office.
My reaction was - damn, these guys sold out to Twitter and don’t care about their users. Something here was not right. Sure, if Summify went belly up then the service would be shut down. But, willingly killing the service is not cool.
This got me thinking about what we would do if someone wanted to buy out DeskAway. If DeskAway is getting a bigger, better home then why not. If they are going to kill the app then a big NO NO. If they are going to pay me to kill the app - then even a bigger NO NO. That would be complete injustice to our users who rely on the service each day.
Luckily, we are not investor-backed (by choice) and do not have the pressure to sell or go IPO. Definitely, not at the cost of our current users.
If Twitter bakes Summify into its service then this acquisition makes a lot of sense. Until then I am going to check out News.me.
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My work-style: Goodbye RSS. Welcome Twitter.
My RSS Reader (Google Reader) has been bugging me for quite some time now. I had subscribed to a lot of sites and realized that I just couldn’t keep up with everything. If I didn’t have to run a company, I could possibly sit at home and read all day/week. Plus, seeing the unread count on Reeder (an amazing iPhone and iPad app) would make me feel that this was one huge task that I had to complete.
A week ago, I unsubscribed to all my RSS feeds and moved those to Twitter i.e. starting following those websites on Twitter (every tech/software/cloud/startup/VC blog has a Twitter presence now). Twitter has become my ultimate news/stories/article consumption tool. If I want to know whats happening in the world I turn to Twitter and my followers. I check this a couple of times a day. If I find something useful and don’t have time to read it I ‘Read Later’ on Instapaper (another cool tool). If I don’t check it I just let it pass and don’t sweat over it - it wasn’t meant my eyeball and if its popular many people will retweet it and I will see it again…
Try it - just follow relevant people, stories, brands - basically, things that you are interested in and keep pruning your followers. Twitter can be your ultimate information consumption buddy.
