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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

My hunch is that this says more about Yahoo than anything else, but without technical details it's hard to be sure. There's been good summarization tech that Yahoo hasn't implemented for at least a decade, despite having dozens of engineers who could be doing so. Did this startup they bought for $30m implement something another class above that yet? Or are they buying themselves up to the par they should've already been at?

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Maybe they were buying a news story.

Wow. I didn't think of that before, but it fits. Yahoo's reputation, at least in the eye of the public, largely consists of being a failed competitor to google, a has-been. Hiring Marissa Mayer certainly got the tech world excited, but I'm not sure that excitement spread far beyond those who were already familiar with her in the context of her work at google.

This acquisition answers the skeptical question I think many of us were asking ourselves: how will yahoo shed its reputation as a has-been and get people to give it a second chance? This is how. This says "we're young and exciting again" more effectively than a high-budget series of TV ads and billboards ever could. Maybe it doesn't send quite that message to the jaded startup crowd, but it certainly sends it to the tech bloggers and interested bystanders, who are the people yahoo is after in the first place. The message is even stronger because of the timing with respect to google reader. I haven't yet decided weather or not I want to believe that it was planned all along.

My intent is not to diminish Nick's accomplishment, although in the name of full disclosure I freely admit jealousy (who wouldn't?). I'd categorize it under both deserving and lucky, with the proviso that "deserving and unlucky" is a rather large category. Good job, Nick, although you certainly don't need to hear it from me :)

I still have to reserve my loudest (virtual) applause for yahoo. This is a brilliant move with brilliant timing which has already generated more hype than I would have expected yahoo to be able to pull off had you asked me only a week ago. Bravo. Maybe they actually do have a turn-around in their future. Maybe.

Stop over-analyzing things. Saying Yahoo made this acquisition for the sake of publicity is an extraordinary claim which is completely unsubstantiated.

That's not an extraordinary claim at all. It's called marketing. Companies spend millions on it all the time.

And it's far from "completely unsubstantiated." Summly was objectively not very good, and the developer appears to have more family connections than he does raw engineering talent.

Yahoo! has tons of talented engineers working for them who could have easily put together another shoddy summarization app (except Yahoo! isn't even using the app--they're shutting it down). Why would they dish out (reportedly) $30 million for a kid who hasn't even graduated from high school?

Your logic: It's not option 1 or 2 (statement is unsubstantiated - when you say it "was objectively not very good," you really mean "in my opinion it was not very good"). So it must be option 3 (also unsubstantiated), since option 3 is the only option left (unsubstantiated).

To answer your last question: 1) As far as I know that kid did not hold any high-ranking role at the company anymore; the talent probably lay elsewhere. 2) There are many reasons and unless your name begins with Marissa and ends with Mayer, you cannot know for sure.

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that's not really how it works

I'll probably have lost my knee-jerk enthusiasm by tomorrow, but I'm not ready to back down from my opinion quite yet. The parent post resonated with me because it made me realize that, in just the past few hours, I had already overheard / participated in three separate conversations with nontechnical people regarding the acquisition. In one of those conversations, someone expressed a desire to check out the app. I can't remember the last time a non-apple product hit that level of visibility. In my neck of the woods (obviously not a representative statistical sample of anything) this story achieved something extraordinary for yahoo, and if it generalizes at anywhere near the same level of effectiveness I could easily believe that it was worth the money.

I'm sure that a significant portion of the acquisition price came from the quality of the app as opposed to publicity (it IS a great app), but I simply don't believe that Yahoo AND Summly didn't know/care about the publicity potential, and by extension I believe it impacted the purchase decision and pricing.

Yahoo has a long history of throwing a metric ton of money at shiny things. This doesn't make Yahoo any cooler.

See: broadcast.com ($5.7B), delicious ($20MM), MyBlogLog, then some Middle Eastern social network Maktoob ($167MM) that then disappeared soon after.

To be fair, Delicious was a bargain that was hugely loved and heavily used by its userbase. The rest, however..

'was'?

I can't speak for it now, but it certainly was at the time. "Was" does not necessarily mean there was a cessation, merely that said state was true at an earlier time.

FWIW though, I was a huge fan at the time and it went majorly downhill after it was sold to Yahoo. I don't know how it is with the new owners, because I moved away.

Replying here, because for some reason can't reply to your child comment. I still use Delicious for all my book-marking. For a time, it looked like it would get killed off, but that didn't happen. I'd be interested to know what anyone else uses, but Delicious.com still works fine for me.

I recently moved to diigo after staying with delicious for about 6 years and being disappointed by the lack of "vision" in the future of the product. Diigo feels like what delicious would have been if yahoo didn't stop improving it, it is fast, simple to use and the browser extension for firefox is okay (which is more than I can say about the delicious one).

Had diigo been unsatisfying for me, I would have likely moved to pinboard which is I think quite popular in the HN crowd.

I guess I was a 'power' Delicious user with several thousand links and.. I switched to a giant text file synced over Dropbox between all my machines and a Ruby script to manage and search it. All I lose are the social features, which I never used anyway (although I remember when del.icio.us/popular was my go-to site for links in the way HN and Reddit are now).

Maktoob didn't disappear: www.maktoob.com

I think I agree with that claim actually. Yahoo's biggest deficit is not a lack of news summarizing apps, and is not a lack of engineering talent. Its deficit is a shitty reputation as a has-been company that is uninteresting to dynamic young talent.

I very much think they bought themselves a boy wonder so they could show him off to the press. I doubt the company actually needs him or his product in any direct sense.

I'm betting it's about talent acquisition.

Like you suggest, the technical part just isn't quite there. I used Summly for almost 3 months, giving it chance and chance again to impress me. It never did. The summaries were mediocre at best and commonly irrelevant, and it got deleted soon after. It's stuck at the point voice recognition is, where it works ok at time, but generally isn't worth the hassle.

Yahoo's been buying up start-ups with good talent but middling traction to do a turn-around. Stamped, Jybe, and now Summly all fit the mold. Yes, they're purchasing at a premium - it's hard to convince a young, scrappy start up founder to join a company with Yahoo's stodgy reputation. But that's exactly what they need - a new infusion of big thinkers to turn around the company.

Having briefly touched this area myself I like to think it is possible to deliver quality summarizations. As with voice recognition the problem is that there is far too much variation in the real world, too many different different standard forms of sentence/ paragraph structure.

"are they buying themselves up to the par they should've already been at?"

They must have decided it was easier to extend summly than to build it organically.

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