[inaseer]

The web is a big place. What's the strategy around seeding it with useful gists so it can gain critical mass? Have you thought about focusing on a niche (say, TED talks?) or possibly automatically summarizing pages? The latter could be tricky as incorrectly or poorly summarized pages would detract users from the site.

[stkbach]

It does automatically summarize any text heavy articles.

For example:

bbc.com/news thewashingtonpost.com huffingtonpost.com reuters.com cnn.com theglobeandmail.com theguardian.com en.wikipedia.org

Go to any of those as a start and submit one of the articles you find and everything suggested by @gist was generated by an algorithm.

Our hope is that will help get the ball rolling. We are certainly very subject to network effects, so focusing on a niche and providing tremendous value to that one vertical is a good strategy.

[inaseer]

Ah, your landing page should make that abundantly clear. That's a very cool feature.

I tried a couple of articles on Washington Post and the algorithm did a decent job. I then read the gist first before reading an article, and while some sentences were a little hard to understand w/o the surrounding context, I felt I still got a decent summary. I can see myself skimming the article through this service instead of relying solely on my eye balls when scanning through.

Couple of suggestions:

- Linking the extracted sentences back to the original page if I want the surrounding context - A tool/browser plug-in which can allow me to select a representative sentence from the story and submit to gist

Seems like a useful stand alone service as it is; having people vote on and submit gists themselves would be cherry on top.

[stkbach]

Thanks! There is a browser plugin planned that will show you the gists of any url you navigate to, and additionally could show the gists of links on a page before you click on them...