p.s. I created a little web app of my own that lets you trace up the retweet chain, to find interesting articles and people. feedback would be much appreciated:
http://gpeters.com/twitter

cheers!
Geoff

Summify is a great service and I’m waiting how they will improve the twitter experience. As Matthew Ingram of GigaOm rightly pointed out, Curation is the future

http://gigaom.com/2012/01/20/twitter-acquisition-confirms-that-curation-is-the-future/

I am picky as hell and for 5 to 6 years I have been looking for a service that would aggregate, cull, parse, then filter potential inbound links to find ones that I would like and may have missed. I have mapped out a few different approaches, have had grad students offer to pull together the known IR and AI algorithms and offer to build pieces only to be sucked into academic work, but when Summify crossed my screen more than a year back I was hooked & gave up thinking of building something.

Summify did the very rare thing of providing articles that floated through services (I too found having it only follow Twitter was the best approach) and pulling 15 things twice a day that I may have interest in and may not have seen. I have 6 to 8 strong non-related interest areas, which makes this a bit difficult. But, Summify in its approach was able to pull together a few things that were good, some meh, some I’d seen, and usually 2 or 3 that were OMG how did I miss this. The 15 things is a great small enough number to scan, but the ability to cull things that have the OMG factor in such a small representation is good, well great. It had stopped me from thinking I need to build something to scratch my own itch, but I started spending time on how did they do this and sorted a few ways to get close, with what you need to monitor to optimize based on individuals overall preferences, but also their shifting short interests.

Summify allowed me to cut back my time in Twitter. I cut it back a lot. The gems in Twitter that mattered to me, I knew would find me, not the if it is important it will find you myth. Summify turned that myth and pop culture broadly cools stuff that “everybody” cares about and turned that on its head to what I really couldn’t afford to miss as well as others with vastly different tastes, interests, and depths of understanding. That is not only cool, but needed and a basic foundation of any service that most services never consider.

I am insanely bummed that they will be shutting it down, but dang if I’m not now thinking this has to be done again but better. As great as it was there are still some things that could be really improved upon. Thanks for your post, it really stirred juices and I come back to it a few times in the last two days.

I spend hours looking for the gems in my twitter feed with very little success, hopefully when they integrate summify it will help.

Rohan: Good points about Tweetdeck. At least it’s not an Adobe AIR app anymore though, right? I also worry about Twitter removing Summify’s ability to cull FB and Google, but at the same time, I felt Summify actually produced *better* results for me when I disconnected FB and Google. Strange, but true.

Lanny: Tweetie has gotten a lot better since it was taken under Twitter’s umbrella, and in fact, Loren was still the guy working on it until a few months ago.

There, now make it.