Last year, then-16-year-old Nick D'Aloisio developed and released the app Summly to be a CliffsNotes for the web. Today the app grows up with an innovative redesign and a more focused set of summarizing skills.
Now, Summly sticks with summarizing news articles, and it does so in a Zite-like fashion. You choose what subject categories you want to follow -- like Technology, Science, or Sports -- and what sources within those categories you want news from. Tap the rectangular topic listings to pull up 350- to 500-word summaries of recently published news articles, which you can browse through with a sideways flick.
"We're not trying to solve the whole problem with personalization, we're rebuilding the content," D'Aloisio told Wired. "We're saying summaries should be the de facto way of consuming content on mobile."
As a writer of articles I'd, well, like people to read, I'm not quite sure how I feel about this outlook. But as someone bombarded with the task of consuming endless amounts of news and information each day, I think the idea of being able to digest brief, accurate summaries sounds extraordinarily convenient.
D'Aloisio wanted the app to be very gesture-based in order to maximize onscreen real estate, so once you're viewing a summary, there are no navigation buttons to guide you. A double tap expands the summary, sideways flicks direct you to other stories, and a flick up from the bottom of the screen sends you back to the topic listing page. When you've expanded a summary, you can tap a plus sign in the upper right corner to get to the full article.
To share a summary, tap and hold anywhere onscreen, and a clover-like menu spirals out from underneath your fingertip. From the menu you can share via Twitter, Facebook, or email, or save a summary.
If I were grading the quality of the summaries the app provides, I'd give them a C. They are logical and grammatically correct, but they can be repetitive or include details within the article that aren't tremendously important to the broader theme. It's certainly enough to get the gist of an article -- but is it any better than just getting the first paragraph or two, like Flipboard and RSS reader apps provide?
In time, it could be. It's a big improvement over the first version of the app -- previously a solo project, Summly now has a staff of more than a dozen, including a handful of people from SRI, the research institute the originally developed the technology of Apple's virtual assistant Siri. The added manpower is evident in both the vastly improved summary-making algorithms and the app's slick yet playful design.
If you're looking for a new way to digest your daily dose of news in a "pocket-sized" amount, give Summly's iOS app a download from the App Store.
