Roughly 2 years ago, we moved from Romania to Vancouver after being accepted into Bootup Labs, an awesome startup incubator. It has been an incredible journey, with lots of highs, a few lows, and many product iterations. In March 2011 we launched our email summary product and we’ve been blown away by the response ever since. Many of our users tell us we found a magical solution to a truly unsolved problem.

Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.

We’d like to give a big thanks to all of our investors and advisors, especially Bootup Labs, Boris Wertz, Rob Glaser, Andrew Braccia, Stewart Butterfield, Steve Olechowski, our users, our team and, of course, the city of Vancouver. Thank you for your support and your faith in us, we couldn’t have made it so far without you!

Follow us on Twitter:
@mirceapasoi, @cgst, @mkychua, @therealnybbles, @prostul

And, a huge thanks to @robncampbell for all his work with us over the last 7 months.

Best,
The Summify Team

FAQ

What happens to Summify?

We will be disabling new account registrations immediately and we will also be removing some features. We will keep the email summaries for a few more weeks, but at some point we will shut down the current Summify product. In the meantime, if you’re a user of Summify you’ll still receive your summaries, just like before.

What features are you removing?

Starting today, the following changes will take effect:
We’re removing the ability to make your summaries public (i.e. all summaries will be private)
We’re removing profile pages and influence pages
We’re removing the auto-publish feature
We’re disabling user registration from the website, iPhone and Hootsuite apps

Why are you removing these features?

We are offering a more streamlined service as we transition our efforts to working at Twitter.

Will you still be in Vancouver?

We will be moving down to San Francisco and will work out of the Twitter office.

What will you be doing at Twitter?

We are joining Twitter’s Growth team and will continue to explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.

UPDATE

Thanks for your notes of congratulations. We’re thrilled to be joining Twitter. Some of you have expressed concerns about the product being shut down. We appreciate your support and enthusiasm. At Twitter, we are going to focus our efforts on making Twitter even more engaging and useful for you. While we can’t get into details on what’s to come, we can say that we’re excited and we think you will be too.

Filter out contributors you don’t enjoy

There are two options here. We recommend trying the first, before making any permanent changes to who you follow on Twitter.

1) Filter domains or human contributors from appearing in future summaries. No change is permanent. Any filters you create will be added to the Filters section of your settings, which can be undone at anytime. Filters are completely private and nobody will ever know if you’ve filtered them out from your summaries.

2) Radically clean your Twitter follow list using iunfollow or more selectively with socialbro. This is a tip from @boichot. Check out our recent Summify Spotlight with him for more tips and tools that will improve your Twitter work-flow.
 

Like a story? Let contributors know. Nothing says “thank-you” better than sharing.

1) Share, Retweet, and Like stories – sharing content that you really like with the world is the best way to show the original author or person who shared it that it’s valued. This will likely lead them to share similar types of content that you will also enjoy. Social signals such as the number of shares, likes, and retweets are a major part of how Summify populates your summaries, so spread the love and share what you like, so that other’s can enjoy it too!

2) Automatically share your summaries to Twitter and Facebook – this is an easy way to share your summaries with your followers each day. To try it out, go to your Sharing settings and select which network you’d like to share to under “Promote.” There are also options for customizing your auto-share message and excluding mentions for contributors.

Note: You can also automatically post your summaries to a Facebook Page, LinkedIn, Instapaper, Read it Later, or Readability using ifttt – a fantastic third party service!

3) After reading your summary, line-up your favorite stories to be shared throughout the day with Buffer. Check out this popular post on how to pair Buffer with Summify – it will change your 2012 social media life – How To Be Awesome On Social Media In 20 Minutes A Day.

Along with the tips above, there’s one more simple thing that will help you improve your summaries.

Summify is designed to handle massive amounts of incoming content and your summaries will tend to get better as you connect more accounts. Haven’t done so already? Give it a try and experience the difference.

Note: you can connect more than one account for each of Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader.

Are you using any of the above methods to enhance your summaries? Maybe you have a tip or two of your own. Share what’s working for you in the comments below.

Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search. Read More

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse.

I should probably explain.

Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Android — in fact, at one point, I loved it. Read More

Facebook profiles don’t die the same way people do. If I Die is a Facebook app that makes sure, even if you die, your social self can still send out your last wishes and post messages to your friends years after you’re gone. Read More

The new Google “Search Plus Your World” feature — which I’m now simply calling “Search Plus” — has just gone live for me. Huge debate erupted yesterday over whether it somehow favors Google+. I can see now that it clearly does, even more than I thought. Here’s a closer look at the changes, including how they turn Google+ into an essential social network for any search marketer. Read More

Once you know what you want to read, make a habit of constraining means. It’s easy to go bananas, reading everything you can get your hands on and more. Make sure you’re not being wasteful of your two biggest resources: time and mental sanity. Set constraints to minimize waste and focus your energy on reading what really matters.
 

Adjust the frequency, timing and number of stories for your summaries

Most people could afford to read less when it comes to their news and that’s why we’ve purposely set a minimalist delivery schedule: 1 summary a day with your top 5 stories. If you find that this lean reading list doesn’t quite suit you, you can tweak the following settings:

Create it at…

Set a base-time that you’re summaries will be generated at each day – we suggest first thing in the morning. If you choose to receive more than one summary per day, this base time is the jumping off point for your delivery schedule.

Want more? Increase story quantity or summary frequency

The default is to receive one summary a day with 5 stories. We recommend starting here and then experimenting if you want more, first by increasing the number of stories in each summary, between 5-15, and then increasing the frequency of your summaries, 1-4 per day. Sometimes summaries will be great and at times they could be better. An alternative to a fixed increase in your summary frequency is to click the on-demand “Get A New Summary” button at the bottom of your email summary whenever you feel like reading more – careful, it’s a slippery slope!

Finding the right combination

Depending on your news reading habits and needs, certain delivery combos might work better for personal vs. work use, however we always recommend starting with less and going from there. Do you have a combo that works especially well for you? Share it below.

This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Ar, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color. Read More

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, has been awarded a knighthood in the New Year Honours list.

Mr Ive, who can now style himself Sir Jonathan, has been made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE).

Raised in Chingford, Mr Ive began working for Apple in 1992 and since then has been the brains behind many of its products.

He described the honour as “absolutely thrilling” and said he was “both humbled and sincerely grateful”. Read More

Eastman Kodak Co. is preparing to seek bankruptcy protection in the coming weeks, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would cap a stunning comedown for a company that once ranked among America’s corporate titans.

The 131-year-old company is still making last-ditch efforts to sell off some of its patent portfolio and could avoid Chapter 11 if it succeeds, one of the people said. But the company has started making preparations for a filing in case those efforts fail, including talking to banks about some $1 billion in financing to keep it afloat during bankruptcy proceedings, the people said. Read More

We’re excited to welcome President Barack Obama to Instagram! We look forward to seeing how President Obama uses Instagram to give folks a visual sense of what happens in the everyday life of the President of the United States. In addition to sharing photos through the @barackobama Instagram account, the Obama 2012 staff is asking supporters to share their photos from the campaign trail with the tag #obama2012. Read More

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world. Read More

-The Summify Team

Now back to your regular scheduled programming, The Weekly Top Stories for Dec 23-29:

It’s going to get worse before it gets better for domain registration company Go Daddy. Yesterday [Dec 23], we reported that Go Daddy had reversed its decision to support SOPA. Its customer service reps are even taking to the phones to beg you to keep your domains with the company. Read More

The Federal Aviation Administration has its reasons for preventing passengers from reading from their Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. But they just don’t add up. Read More

3. Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet

In a single minute there are over 695,000 status updates on Facebook. That’s just one example of the mind boggling scale of online activity. The following infographics show a bunch of other incredible things that happen in 60 seconds (via Barry Ritholtz).

 

4. Steve Jobs: 20 Life Lessons

My feelings about Steve Jobs have always been a little mixed. I long admired his entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen and was in sheer awe of his natural instincts for what appeals to consumers. On the other hand I bristled at what I saw as his — and by extension Apple’s — occasionally capricious and even contradictory actions (App store products in or out, inability to get in front of product issues, antennaegate) and super-secretive nature.

Now, having finished the 600-plus page Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, I think I finally understand Steve Jobs. Read More

 

5. Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day

At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things. Read More

 

]]> http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/31/weekly-top-stories-happy-new-year/feed/ 0 robincampbell shame 25bits-disrupt-blog480 in60secsinfographic in60secs2infographic steve-jobs-mash-360-2 y_combinator_logo_400 http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/30/top-influencers-by-klout/ http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/30/top-influencers-by-klout/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:00:02 +0000 Robin Campbell http://blog.summify.com/?p=7620611398 ]]> We hope you’ve all had some fantastic holidays and found your summaries helpful in allowing you to enjoy your time offline. I certainly did!

Summify helps all sorts of people discover the top news flowing through their social networks. With all this summarizing going on, it’s easy to forget about the hard-working people behind the summaries who bring us all those great stories. Some of them are entrepreneurs, bloggers, editors, creatives, and even lawyers turned world travelers. No matter who they are, they all have one thing in common – producing, sharing, or curating high quality content. As we round-out 2011, we wanted to take a second to shout-out some of the top online influencers in the Summify community for their hard work in spreading read-worthy content.

With a little help from Sunnytrail, we’ve rounded-up the the top online influencers in the Summify community, based on Klout score. Regardless of if you’re a fan of the controversial score or not, it’s hard to argue anyone below is undeserving. Here they are:

Listing is based on Klout score as of Mon Dec 19

 

New York, Creative
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / TheMRK.com

San Francisco, Technology
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / milkinc.com

United States, Media
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / brainpickings.org

London, Media
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / zee.me

Los Angeles, Technology
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / conference.launch.is

New York, Media
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / anthonyderosa.tumblr.com

Tokyo, Technology
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / blogs.itmedia.co.jp/saito/

Taipei, Technology
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / tw.myblog.yahoo.com/bestguy-express

Hamburg, Public Relations
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / Google+

Mountain View, Technology
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / blog.elatable.com

San Francisco, Media
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter / allthingsd.com/

 

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Craig Kanalley 73K – Social Media Editor @NBCNews. Formerly HuffPost senior editor.
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter

Susan Beebe 73K – Global Social Media at Dell. Social web, digital media, emerging tech
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter

Hooman Radfar 73K – CEO of @clearspring, makers of @addthis
Summify Summary / Klout Report / Twitter

Eric Dupin 72K – Blogueur influençable sur Presse-citron
Summify / Klout / Twitter

Michael Q Todd 72K – Recovering Kiwi lawyer, author & love promoter
Summify / Klout / Twitter

Nico Lumma 72K – http://about.me/lumma
Summify / Klout / Twitter

Jodi Ettenberg 72K – World traveler, marshmallow enthusiast, writer & former lawyer
Summify / Klout / Twitter

Nassim Ghandour 72K – Photographer – PathMotion.com CTO
Summify / Klout / Twitter

 

Worth a follow?

So there you have it, the most influential people on Summify in 2011. Do you think any of these influencers are worth a follow? Let us know below.

]]> http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/30/top-influencers-by-klout/feed/ 4 robincampbell SkyeNicolas bio KevinRose Bio MariaPopova bio Zee bio JasonCalacanis bio AntDeRosa bio ToruSaito bio CharlesLee bio StevenKeuchel bio BradleyHorowitz bio LizGannes bio http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/23/weekly-top-stories-dec-16-22/ http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/23/weekly-top-stories-dec-16-22/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:00:43 +0000 Robin Campbell http://blog.summify.com/?p=7620611539 ]]>

1. Announcing the 2011 Mashable Awards Winners

Although we did not take home the Up-and-Coming Social Media Service award we’d like to thank everyone in our great community who voted Summify throughout the competition! Congratulations crowdtap, you win this round!

The votes are in and the results have been tabulated: After two months of nominations and voting by our community, Mashable is thrilled to announce the winners of the 2011 Mashable Awards!

The fifth annual Mashable Awards honors the best in Mashable‘s core content areas: Social Media, Tech, Business and Entertainment. Read More

 

2. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il dies ‘of heart attack’

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has died of a heart attack at the age of 69, state media have announced.

Millions of North Koreans were “engulfed in indescribable sadness”, the KCNA state news agency said, as people wept openly in Pyongyang. Read More

 

3. Type “Let It Snow” on Google for a Pleasant Surprise

 

4. The Top 20 iPhone And iPad Apps of 2011

Editor’s note: Contributor Brad Spirrison is the managing editor of mobile app discovery services Appolicious, AndroidApps.com and AppVee. With this post, he continues an annual tradition of picking the best iOS apps of the year.

It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it. Read More

 

5. Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works

I remember fondly the days when we were all tickled pink by our elected officials’ struggle to understand how the internet works. Whether it was George W. Bush referring to “the internets” or Senator Ted Stevens describing said internets as “a series of tubes,” we would sit back and chortle at our well-meaning but horribly uninformed representatives, confident that the right people would eventually steer them back on course. Well I have news for members of Congress: Those days are over. Read More

 

Christmas Bonus – Steve Jobs: 20 Life Lessons

My feelings about Steve Jobs have always been a little mixed. I long admired his entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen and was in sheer awe of his natural instincts for what appeals to consumers. On the other hand I bristled at what I saw as his — and by extension Apple’s — occasionally capricious and even contradictory actions (App store products in or out, inability to get in front of product issues, antennaegate) and super-secretive nature. Read More

]]> http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/23/weekly-top-stories-dec-16-22/feed/ 0 robincampbell MashableAwards winners Kim Jong-il google-let-it-snow apps-iphone mel-watt_large jobs apple http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/22/cook-up-your-productivity-auto-pilot-daily-internet-tasks-with-ifttt/ http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/22/cook-up-your-productivity-auto-pilot-daily-internet-tasks-with-ifttt/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:01:02 +0000 Robin Campbell http://blog.summify.com/?p=7620611484 ]]> We all have our own routine tasks, often daily, that can take up a considerable amount of our time and usually tend to be quite boring or are difficult to stay on top of. We dream of the day a handy personal assistant or even a well-trained chimpanzee, depending on the task simplicity, could punch the keyboard at 100 strokes a second to take care of it all for us. Day dream no more, ifttt is here to put the internet to work for you.
 

What’s ifttt (if this then that)?

Using a simple trigger and action format, ifttt allows you to connect any two web services together to perform tasks on auto-pilot. For example, add a photo to Instagram and have it uploaded into a Facebook album, automatically. You create a trigger (Instagram) which causes an action (Facebook). The combinations you can create are only limited to your imagination and the channels – the web services and devices you use every day – that are on ifttt.

Take a look through the ifttt channels to see the web applications you can use to create triggers and actions. A trigger + action = task, and you can create your own recipes (task formulas) to share with your friends or community.
 

ifttt recipes for Summify

Share summaries direct to your Facebook Page, instead of your personal profile (not yet possible within Summify itself), and customize the message!

Automatically save your articles for later reading:

 

Some other popular recipes involving:

Twitter
Facebook
Google Reader
Read it Later
Instapaper

Take a look at your work-flow and let your imagination loose to see what combinations you can come up with. Can you think of some other helpful tasks that would help you with your Summifying? Create a new recipe on ifttt and let us know below.

]]> http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/22/cook-up-your-productivity-auto-pilot-daily-internet-tasks-with-ifttt/feed/ 4 robincampbell ifttt Instapaper to Facebook Rain to SMS Summify to FB page Summify to instapaper Summify to read it later Summify to readability http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/20/how-to-be-awesome-on-social-media-in-20-minutes-a-day/ http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/20/how-to-be-awesome-on-social-media-in-20-minutes-a-day/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:10:53 +0000 Robin Campbell http://blog.summify.com/?p=7620611440 ]]> This is a guest post by Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer. More about him at the bottom of this post.

As sharing is predicted to absolutely explode in the coming 2012 year, many smart people have predicted a “Shareapocalypse”. Or to speak with the words of Nova Spivack, who says:

“In the Sharepocalypse hundreds (if not thousands) of online friends share content with us across various social networks, culminating in massive information overload.”

So how can we best battle this information overload out there? With a few awesome tools, I believe it can be done. A lot of great apps have emerged to organize, consume and share your content much more efficiently than before.

Here are my top pointers for you to make the most of Social Media in just 20 minutes a day:
 

5 minutes: Find the best content from your Social Networks

If you really don’t want to spend any more than 5 minutes per day to get the best content from around the web, Summify is your top tool. It pulls in all the content from your Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader stream. It then passes it through their smart algorithm and comes up with the best stories based on your reading habits.

Through this, you will always be kept up to date and get your daily dose of news straight to your inbox. With the new “on demand” stories button, you can even choose to get another summary of news, if the one you received isn’t quite right for you.

Timing: Personally I love doing this early in the morning, just when I get up.

 

5 minutes: Share the best content more effectively on Twitter and Facebook

Now, the worst thing that could happen, is if I were to take 5 minutes to read my great Summify summary, and then blast all the top stories out to my followers, 5 at once and flood my stream. If you still want to keep your day productive, spending as little time as possible, there are a lot of smart ways to make sharing easier for yourself.

What I like to do once I have received my social summary, is to drop those awesome articles into my Buffer. Buffer will then go ahead and post them for me at the best times to Facebook or Twitter, well spaced out over the day, and my followers will receive the updates, one at a time, easy to digest.

Timing: Filling up my Buffer with Summify stories happens early in the morning too, just after I finish reading my summary.

 

10 minutes: Engage, comment, like, retweet and reply

The last 10 minutes, which I normally spend in the evening, after a lot of my content has been posted and got responses, I spend engaging with my followers. It is often hard to do this in a focused way, as engaging normally happens very impulsively.

So here are a few things that I do to stay focused and get more out of my time engaging with friends and followers:

• • Reply individually to your new followers, by looking at their bio and finding something you really appreciate about what they do.
• • Pick out 3 Facebook stories, like them and comment with a sign of appreciation.
• • Answer a question someone asked in your Twitter stream, or try pointing them to someone who could possibly help.
• • Browse your stream or Twitter lists and add whatever you find interesting as retweets into your Buffer. The Twitter.com integration of Buffer makes this super easy.

Timing: I normally do this in the late afternoon, early evening. It is a great task to relax and normally a lot of fun.

 

Your results

If you try out this technique by just spending 20 minutes a day, you will be amazed, by how much can achieve. Doing this, has helped me increase my click rate on Tweets tremendously. Being focused when you engage also has helped me to grow my network a lot faster than I had anticipated.

Combining Summify and Buffer, will give you a Social Media power combination of sharing and finding the best content you can possibly find – in the least amount of time spent.

To track your progress, simply take a peak at your Buffer analytics. It will show you how many clicks, retweets and the reach your posts have gotten. And especially if you are swapping to Buffer to share Summify stories from now onwards, I am sure you will see a jump in mentions, replies and retweets.

Personally, after I have been a lot more focused and a lot more positive with my commenting, retweeting and replying, I saw lots of improvement on both my follower count and click rate.

Over to you now. Do you think trying this 20 minute technique for 1 week could make a difference to your Social Media results?

 
About the Author:

Leo Widrich is co-founder of Buffer, keeping the community alive and buzzing by blogging fabulous Twitter tips on the Buffer blog. He loves writing and football and he’s a super helpful guy, so do say hello! You can catch him on Twitter at @LeoWid.

]]> http://blog.summify.com/2011/12/20/how-to-be-awesome-on-social-media-in-20-minutes-a-day/feed/ 19 robincampbell Summify summary Buffer it showing love Buffer analytics LeoWid