Twitter Buying Summize - If A Rumor Makes TechCrunch AND RWW Is It Still A Rumor?

The internet is always rife with rumor and innuendo, just ask any Mac lover. We live and breath rumors that can be generated with something as small as a bit of weight loss from Steve Jobs, a shipping label or a timely patent filing. Lately it is social media that has been riding the rumor train.

Today's latest is the one about Twitter and Summize. After the first few blogs picked up the rumor it appeared on Read Write Web and TechCrunch . I'm not sure how much credibility this game of telephone has, but the story intrigued me enough to engage in a bit of speculation. Intrigue and guesswork is always a fun way to wile away the time.

If Twitter really is buying Summize that says a lot about Twitter's state of decline. They already told users to use Summize instead of Twitter recently during a time when they had turned off the essential "Replies" tab and "older" buttons. Sending users to a third party site was a huge indicator that the Fail Whale level is much higher than originally thought.

Can buying a third party application that has a success rate as an entity  apart from Twitter help Twitter? I don't actually think so, and I'm sure it may hurt Summize if true. Currently Summize does not seem to be affected by Twitter's rollercoaster of functionality. This is precisely because it is not subjected to Twitter's behind the scenes woes.

Should Summize truly be acquired by Twitter, I see it losing its usefulness in a hurry as it, too, starts to go down for longer and longer periods of time. Worse would be if it got integrated into Twitter as a feature. You know what Twitter does with useful features, right? It turns them off every other day to "help" scale. Remember the With Others feature? Yeah, I miss that also.

As the rumors fly we cling to our beloved whale, hoping those fat birds can keep him afloat. Some have abandoned the Fail Whale for other services already, as more and more Twitter cloners try and snag the market share from the unlikely microblogging giant. I hope Twitter makes it, but if it needs to buy other services to gain functionality, that does not bode well for its long term survival.