Summify Shutdown Means Big Gains for News.me

When social news startup Summify announced Thursday that it was being acquired by Twitter, it looked like the Summify’s existing users were out-of-luck — the company said the current version of the service would be shut down.

Enter News.me. The company is best-known for its iPad newsreading app (which was developed at The New York Times, then commercialized by incubator betaworks) but it also offers an email digest of news from your Twitter stream, similar to Summify. It sounds like jilted Summify users jumped on News.me as an alternative, so the company published a blog post telling Summify users, “We’re here for you,” outlining upcoming features like Facebook integration, and asking for feedback.

News.me general manager Jake Levine told me via email that since Summify’s announcement, News.me has been seeing 10 times its normal daily sign ups. He didn’t say specifically how many sign ups that entails, but he noted “tens of thousands of people are already enjoying the News.me Daily Digest” and that it enjoys “consistently awesome open and click through rates.”

“Feature requests are pouring in through our blog post, on Hacker News, and on twitter,” Levine said. “Summify users clearly feel left out in the cold, and have been highly receptive to our message.”