Get your news in faster, more digestible bites
(MoneyWatch) No one seems to have time for anything anymore. In my lifetime, we've gone from magazines to Web sites to blogs to tweets. Who has time to talk? We text instead. If you are looking for a faster way to digest your news, I might have just the thing.
Summly is an iPhone app that digests news stories for folks who want to read on the go. The app has been around for a while, but an all new makeover makes it worth taking a second look.
At first glance, Summly doesn't seem especially unique. It's hard not to like the clever interface, of course: You choose the news you want from a slew of category tiles like Business, Tech, U.S. News, World News, Entertainment, and more. You can add your own topics, in fact, just by entering a keyword that interests you. I typed in "Sandy," and instantly had access to a personal news feed about the hurricane. Each category houses some number of articles (generally something less than two dozen) and you can flip through them with the flick of a finger.
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But this is where Summly gets interesting. You can read the entire source article, of course, or, with a double tap, instantly read an algorithmically generated summary of the article. In other words, Summly can summarize the article for you. The summary more or less fits on a single screen, so you can get all the most important bits of the story without reading the whole thing.
How does it do? Surprisingly well. In my testing, Summly was pretty good about pulling out the most relevant details in each story, so I could scan a dozen articles in the time you might ordinarily taker to read one or two.
Summly is free, and well worth checking out -- especially if you're so busy that you only scanned the first and last paragraph of this post.
Dave Johnson
View all articles by Dave Johnson on CBS MoneyWatch »
Dave Johnson is editor of eHow Tech and author of three dozen books, including the best-selling How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera. Dave has previously worked at Microsoft and has written about technology for a long list of magazines that include PC World and Wired.
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