Twitter splashes out for news aggregator Summify

Twitter has agreed to acquire news aggregator startup Summify to boost its news management capabilities.

Summify said in a posting to its site that it would be joining up with the microblogging giant. Founded in Romania, the company has more recently been based in Vancouver, Canada at the Bootup Labs startup incubator facility.

The Summify platform allows users to collect and summarise news items into a single visual feed. The service is able to deliver the news feeds as a web page, email message and mobile application.

"Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time-efficient manner," the company said in a blog post announcing the deal.

"As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realised it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Word of the merger comes as Twitter faces increased competition from rival social networking paltforms. Facebook has been increasingly focused on the microblogging space with its News Feed updates. Meanwhile, the Google+ network has sought to boost its profile by integrating with the company's search platform, a move Twitter dismissed as "bad for people."