Yesterday Twitter casually announced on its blog the acquisition of Summize, a Virginia-based real-time search startup calling it "A Perfect Match." I could not agree with them more as they wasted little time and have launched a new search Twitter Search tool at search.twitter.com. If you are a heavy Twitter user then you have encountered problems using Twitter as they at times have had to turn off certain features leaving many to find other means, like Summize as shown in this recent tweet.
The deal is said to be worth $15M stock and cash and depending upon how long the team stays at Twitter they could benefit from Twitter eventually getting acquired too. Congrats to the Virginia/DC-based Summize team who are also DC TECH cocktailers as it does look to be an ideal exit and integration into Twitter.
In first looking at the Twitter Search page the first thing that popped into my mind was Google. I think it is obvious there is a resemble in layout etc but I also think Google is going to eventually buy Twitter. Not only for the social conversation piece but for the real-time conversational search piece as Google needs to continue to evolve as the Web evolves and looks to integrate conversations into a search product. Google could re-create their own real-time search functionality similar to how they created Blog Search as they already index Twitter results. This integration could be similar to how Google Blog Search took over a blog search market leaving then blog search king Technorati scrambling to find a new direction and Sphere to switch its business to more of a distributed contextual related items play. But I think that Twitter's value is continuing to grow with market adoption as Congress and potentially a future President are on Twitter.