Summize is a search engine that searches Twitter in real time. At first I thought this was a really bad idea. Instant access to a lot of useless information. But Summize is actually a lot of fun and has some real life applications.

If you find Twitter useful, you will enjoy Summize. And I do: Twitter can be a source of data for the anthropology of the present moment. I sometimes lurk on Twitter’s public timeline, amazed to have a glimpse of the lives of people all around the globe and what they are doing right now. But in addition to being fascinating, it’s confusing and very, very fragmented.

With Summize, you can search for a topic like Firefox 3.0 or the UEFA EURO2008 football championship. There are plenty of buzz options here for anyone interested in anything: Politics, music, sports… And when there’s breaking news, this will be a great way to stay on top of it.

You can choose to show results in any language or to extract tweets in Arabic, Dutch, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai.

All search results are available via standard Atom and JSON feeds, for use in readers and mashups.

Summize Labs are working on prototypes that harness conversations within blogs and reviews.