Twitter to buy Summize.com
joshchandlerblog.blogspot.com
joshchandlerblog.blogspot.com
Right now, Twitter is flush with cash from their recent funding. They need to continue their growth and their best engineers are obviously working to keep the site alive rather than designing new features.
As such, it makes lots of sense to add features through acquisition given their circumstances. This particular feature has been tried and tested to work with their existing infrastructure. Because it builds on their API, they also don't have to worry about the design breaking during their internal scalability refactoring.
This deal makes lots of sense to me and I would expect to see more of this from them as they fight to keep aloft.
How much money would be spent on the scalability testing to see if the service can handle an Apple WWDC without crippling the rest of Twitter?
I think you're greatly underestimating what they did with Summize. It's not rocket science, but there's real (and tried-by-fire) value there for Twitter. Summize didn't get $750k in angel funding to sell to someone in low 5 digits.
We're talking about live search over a medium completely made up of small, frequent text messages. Real-time searching increases Twitter's value as the instantaneous information source it has become. They don't have a lot of strengths to build on, but that's definitely one of the most valuable things Twitter has to offer and Summize augments that.
No brainer: buy Summize for a 2-4 million, add their search tools, get some of their engineers helping in the scalability problems, improve the API based on their feedback, have some of them continue working on their lab prototypes, and keep growing.
What do you think it costs to hire a good engineer? How about a good engineer who is already pretty intimately familiar with your offering's API? What about a collection of good engineers that are already used to working together?
Right now Twitter needs to keep current users excited, because we're all really tired of Twitter's downtime. The only thing keeping us on Twitter is the other Twitter users. If a critical mass of users leaves, Twitter becomes a distant memory. They are probably trying to avoid that by adding features that don't kill their current database.
Just speculation, of course. Sometimes it's a good idea to assume that they are making a good move instead of thinking that you're clearly smarter than them and they are "teh fail" for doing this.