Some ideas stay good
Russel Beattie says of the Twitter+Summize deal:
I think if Twitter doesn't end up buying Summize, or even if they do that they should re-focus a lot of their effort in this area as this stuff is valuable to a ton of other services out there. (This was no doubt Summize's original business plan...). I just have that gut feeling of its inherent value, and it seems huge to me. Imagine a "topic engine" that did nothing but scour the latest blog posts, tweets, forum posts, etc. and created live topic lists for tons of areas? Like Nielson on steroids. It seems to me it'd be a really valuable position to be in: "Why is that important? Oh, Summize said it was."
I think he'd dead right.
I've thought such a thing was a great idea, in one form or another, for quite a few years now and even had a shot at building it. Russell's being all retro by calling it a topic engine but the key point is that you go beyond simply knowing that something is tagged (not very interesting) to combining tag information in a way that adds value.
Om Malik seems to suggest that Summize are going a step deeper than surface topics:
"We monitor collective attitudes being expressed right now on the web," is how Summize describes itself. In other words, it can quickly look at data coming from conversational sources - RSS feeds and Twitter tweets - and offer a quick opinion as to what is being talked about.
Opinion is, semantically, a step up from the kind of topics most people are dealing with and is a good deal more useful besides.
It remains to be seen just how useful Summize's analysis is but I find it interesting.