Summify Shutdown Means Big Gains for News.me

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... → Learn More

news me
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.”


Company: betaworks
Website: betaworks.com
Launch Date: January 2007
Funding: $27.5M

betaworks believes in the power of the real-time social web. We believe that the popularity of the real-time and social aspects of the web represent a radical shift in how people use and interact with the Internet. The future is about dynamic streams of information, not static pages. It’s about push, not pull; it’s about enabling publishing tools and data; and it’s about the ways we touch, experience and interact with the Internet and each other. With this...

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