Curate your news with Summify

I decided to check out Summify after noting a few people in my community making use of the application. Summify is attempting to make it faster for you to find the most important news, as they note on their home page:

“Summify automatically identifies the most important news stories for you across all of your social networks and tells why they are important, so you can read what really matters. Summify gets better and better as you follow or subscribe to more and more sources!”

Summify can make curation faster but does have a few wrinkles that I will note a little later.

Summify is a free product that allows you to identify, aggregate, and share your content from your Twitter account, your Google Reader, and your Facebook account. It renders the information in a clean interface that allows you to choose between Top News and Recent Updates. Top News appears to be based upon the number of times the content was shared as well as data from Klout and Infochimps.

As you select articles you gain more information about who in your community has shared this information.

You can see, from the screen capture above, that Summify identifies each source, across all three channels, that shared this content. One of my biggest challenges is always thanking everyone for the great content they share, this is a nice solution to that problem. In fact, if you choose to share the content you will see that Summify handles the attribution, for Twitter, automatically:

No more remembering to give attribution. This is not perfect, of course, as you may want to include the “1 other” that was dropped off of the share. The addition of templates for the default text would go a long way here.

Also, if you do not want to share the content on Twitter it would be great if the default text took advantage of this fact by leaving out the Twitter handles and use longer text describing the article you are sharing.

However, it is free.

While this would work well for a small organization or an individual, it is lacking in many capabilities that are required to make it more broadly useful. These include:

• The ability to specify more than one account of each type. Many businesses, and several individuals, maintain multiple Twitter accounts.
• Support for Facebook Pages and Groups.
• More control over the definition of Top News. Users need to be able to specify search terms (e.g. “Open Government”), Twitter lists, etc…
• As noted above, the ability to specify a default template for your share messages would help, along with the ability to customize the message per social media channel.
• LinkedIn support is a nice to have.

What do you think?

John