So Yahoo bought Summly this week. If you missed it: Summly is the news app made by Nick D'Aloisio, a 17-year-old kid from London who's been building this thing since he was 15, and Yahoo just paid something like $30 million for it. Monday was the official announcement, and by Tuesday morning my Twitter feed was just wall-to-wall "child prodigy" headlines, which, fine, it's a good story. Kid teaches himself to code, licenses some summarization tech that traces back to SRI International (the same lab that spun out Siri, which is a fun detail nobody's making enough of), builds an app that chops news articles down to about 400 characters so they fit on a phone screen without you having to tap through, and now he's richer than most of us will ever be. Good for him, genuinely.
But I want to talk about the part of this story that isn't the teenager, because that's the part everyone's already covering to death and I don't have much to add to it. What I keep thinking about is what happens to Summly in eighteen months.
I've used Summly on and off since it landed in the App Store back in November. It's a neat little thing, snappy, does what it says, doesn't try to be more than it is. And I already know, with something close to certainty, that it's going to get folded into Yahoo's app or turned into a feature and quietly stop existing as its own thing. Maybe not this year. Maybe not even next year. But it'll happen. Yahoo has a pattern here and it's not a subtle one.
I still have a knot of resentment about Delicious, if I'm honest. I had years of bookmarks in there, tagged and organized the way I liked, and then Yahoo let it rot for so long that by the time they finally sold it off to the AVOS guys (the YouTube founders) in 2011, half the reason to use it was already gone. Nobody killed it outright, they just starved it of attention until it wasn't worth using anymore, which might be worse. And everybody remembers GeoCities, obviously. That one actually did get shut down, pages and all, back in 2009. So when I see "Yahoo acquires app," my brain doesn't go to "exciting expansion," it goes to "countdown timer started."
Marissa Mayer's been CEO since last summer and this is very clearly part of a pattern of trying to buy her way back to relevance, snapping up small teams and products instead of building everything in-house, which is a totally reasonable strategy on paper. I don't even think it's a bad move specifically. Summly's tech is genuinely useful for a company that desperately needs a better mobile story, and folding D'Aloisio and his team in-house probably makes more sense long-term than leaving Summly to compete as a standalone app against, well, Yahoo's own products. I get the logic. I just don't trust the follow-through, because I've watched this exact movie before with this exact studio.
There's also something a little strange about the size of the number that I haven't seen anyone address directly. Thirty million dollars is a huge sum for an app that, as far as I can tell, had a modest but not massive user base. I don't doubt the underlying tech has value — the natural-language summarization stuff is legitimately hard to do well, and doing it well on a phone with no real computing muscle is harder still. But I do wonder how much of that price tag is buying technology and how much of it is buying a headline. "Yahoo acquires teenage genius" writes itself as a press cycle, and press cycles are worth something to a company trying to convince the world it's not dying.
Anyway. I'll keep the app on my phone until it stops working, same as I do with everything else Yahoo's ever bought off someone smarter than them. If you want to read a proper writeup on the summarization tech itself rather than my grumbling about Yahoo's acquisition history, there were a few good technical breakdowns posted this week that actually dug into the SRI licensing angle — worth a search if that's the part that interests you more than the corporate soap opera.