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When you buy a company run by a 16 years old guy for $30 million you are either out of mind or you know that age doesn’t matter anymore. The ability to build a product, hire people and innovate is something that a certain set of people share in their veins, at any time of their lives, without having attended a single business class. That’s why Marissa Mayer bought Summly and made the young and “inexperienced” Nick D’Aloisio a millionaire.
Summly aimed at summarising whatever website you wanted to look at. The concept was to shorten the content you were interested in. A simple and yet not very implemented (personal tastes) idea was part of the long list of acquisitions that Marissa Mayer made in the last two years at Yahoo. After joining Yahoo, Summly was shut down and the product was pivoted to a bigger concept that was launched at CES, called Yahoo News Digest.
The app “provides a definitive summary of all the important, need-to-know news. Digests are delivered twice a day - once in the morning and once in the evening. All the top stories are summarized and presented with the key information that you need to stay on top of what’s happening.”
Further “Each story is created from multiple sources to present the essential bits and pieces of information, known as “Atoms”. Atoms are key quotes, images, videos, stock tickers, maps, infographs, and Wikipedia excerpts among others. These atomic units provide a unique context to the news. Our stories are both algorithmically and hand curated to ensure high quality, and come with a textual summary.”
Yahoo launched News Digest on Android a few days ago and ever since I have been playing with it. “Playing with it” is probably not the right sentence for this app, which doesn’t aim at a constant and never ending user experience such as Flappy Bird. Since you only receive two digests a day, the key is to give to the user the right content at the right moment, in the morning and in the afternoon.
The digest gives you eight topics to read and discover. Moreover you can also choose to read other extra news. If you are a person who usually misses the news and doesn’t pay much attention to how the world is spinning, this app is for you. With the digests sent twice a day, you can cope with velocity of the earth.
On the other hand, if you are someone who reads a lot, such as me, I think this app is probably irrelevant. The two notifications are a bit annoying since they add a plus two to the overall daily counter of notifications. Further, the way the news is given doesn’t let you go deeper (which is also the aim of the app) and understand what really happened.
What the team behind this app is facing is the difficulty to combine many sources in a single good one. The idea of showing Wikipedia’s bits, tweets, pictures and videos is good, but how relevant is to what I really want to know? If I want to read the news, Wikipedia and Twitter are basically useless; but as I was stating before, if you need a superficial and quick read, all these tools are what you need.
The final point is wondering how big this market can be. It’s true we are all living in fast and dynamic lives, which don’t let us catch with the world; but do we really want to have everything summarised in this way? The initial concept of Summly could have been a lot useful if applied to Wikipedia, Books and even Papers, because sometimes the information regarding things we don’t know is too much; but applied to the news, it ruins the experience of having a 30 minutes break and enjoy our reading.
The app gets an 8 out of 10. The design and smoothness make it simpler in terms of reading and using it. Further the colour and the pictures chosen, taken by Flickr, help the overall app to stand out. However from a personal point of view, the app is a 3 out of 10, but I am probably part of a small niche market.
