TL;DR — Faster News
I don't want to step on these guys' PR, but I do have a similar personal project for anybody who is interested, <a href="http://newspaper23.com" rel="nofollow">http://newspaper23.com</a><p>Initially it's just an aggregator that presents commentary in plain text. I plan on adding a summarizer one day. For a personal project, I've been using it daily for over a year, so I know I find a lot of value in this type of thing.<p>As sites try to get more sticky, the signal-to-noise ratio decreases. You spend more time reading a lot of trivial articles that a Facebook friend recommended instead of a few articles that you've scanned yourself. I know Google and FB say social search is the cool thing, but in my experience the only thing it does is increase consumption of mediocre shiny stuff. Much better to pre-qualify sources and then control the depth of your dive. For newspaper23, one of the original ideas was a timer for each day. 30 minutes of scanning and the site would refuse to load until the next day.<p>I'd like to see more of this type of thing -- gearing content consumption to humans instead of site creators and advertisers.