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Summify Distills Your News Into Five Bites of Personalized 'Net Goodness

by Leila Brillson on March 31, 2011 at 10:50 AM

summify
The Web 2.0 idea of the Internet -- that it is a vast landscape with feral stories running alongside civilized, "official" ones, a place where liking a story becomes "Liking" a story, and a place where you haphazardly broadcast everything from your dinner location to your fight with your girlfriend -- is getting old. Too many choices. Too much information. The barrage of feeds or check-ins or retweets makes our collective eyes glaze over. Time to simplify.

So Summify, in its Zen-like approach to the Web, offers the five stories that you need to read every day. By surfing your feeds and quietly culling from your friends, the Web app provides a nicely packaged, streamlined version of The Web That Matters to Only You. The basic, straightforward approach is not for privacy freaks. In order to access your reading habits and data, Summify goes into your social networks and your Google life to pick and choose the stories that are popular among your friends and feeds.

I signed up, but Summify is still working its magic and quietly monitoring my info; it will have to do so for several hours, so I cannot yet attest to its effectiveness. But the sheer clarity of the app speaks to an emerging trend in Internet consumption. No more all-intertwined-ness turning our day-to-day into an all-encompassing imbroglio of info. Give us the Internet exactly how we want it, skimming off all of the fatty noise that distracts us from the basic stuff we need to know. Perhaps that's Web 3.0: a super-tailored, practically self-monitoring system that renders the news, friends and media that apply only to you.

That is, of course, if products like Summify can accurately predict what I need to know. Who can say if it can locate all of the rapidly emerging viral cat videos in a timely manner? I do not want to minimize my Internet experience to the point of bare bones. Hopefully these kinds of sites will allow breaking international news and Maru to coexist.

Tags: feedreader, Internet, summify, top, web

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