Twitter’s 2012 social-news acquisition that summarized online discussions was called Summify.
Summify was a Vancouver-based service that collected links and stories shared by a user’s social network and produced concise summaries. Its technology was designed to reduce the effort needed to follow a large volume of online information.
Twitter acquired Summify in January 2012. The service was shut down after the acquisition, while members of its team joined Twitter. The deal reflected Twitter’s interest in helping users discover important content rather than simply reading an entirely chronological stream.
Summify is sometimes confused with Storify, a separate service that allowed users to assemble social posts into stories. Twitter acquired Posterous in 2012 as well, but Posterous was a blogging platform, not the social-news summarization service described here.