Watch Out StumbleUpon, Pu.ly Is Here

Pu.ly could give StumbleUpon some competition. It could take a while to topple StumbleUpon given its over 20 million users and over 1 billion stumbles each month, but what Pu.ly lacks in size it makes up for in relevance.

For me StumbleUpon is hit and miss with its often dated results and submissions intended solely to drive traffic. The secret weapon of Pu.ly is that your "pulls" can be displayed based on your Know About It account. As stated in the previous review of Know About It's service they scan your social accounts and content subscriptions to email you "recommendations to the next level with intuitive analysis of multiple data sources to truly show what you want to see, not just aggregated stories that were shared the most".

They built Pu.ly's discovery engine on top of that platform to show you random content that is interesting to you. Using their algorithms and the mountains of user data they have about what you and others like you like they bring relevance to a new level. Most importantly it is fresh and recent content, with the majority coming from your social streams. While using the service when logged in and linked with Know About It you can see what people in your social circles are saying about the pulls via the chatter button and also share a pull directly to Twitter and Facebook.

If you prefer, or don't have a Know About It account, you can still "pull another". The results will still be timely and interesting, just not personalized to your interests. The service is new and will certainly improve over time. A good feature to add would be to incorporate a yes/no button to further gauge a logged in user's interest in the displayed item; another would be to have the ability to toggle on/off sharing to specific networks.

Give Pu.ly a try today and share your thoughts. I highly recommend you set up a Know About It account to enhance what you are shown. Today I will be pulling stories and not falling all over and stumbling while I look for good things to read.

Summify Alternatives - Percolate, NewsWhip, News.me, XYDO, Curate.Me, Know About It, Utopic, and Scoopinion

As you may know, Summify has been acquired by Twitter (source backup) and is closing the product and company. Many have been upset about the news while others see the future. After conversing with Mircea Paşoi, co-founder of Summify, I am excited to see what Twitter and the team come out with. He said to me:

We are going to focus our efforts on making Twitter even more engaging and useful for you. While we can’t get into details on what’s to come, we can say that we’re excited and we think you will be too.

Lets hope the product that many love will be back in some form. (Update: Twitter has launched a weekly email digest.) Until then, there are some viable alternatives. I have been using all of these side by side with Summify for some time now and most provide content on a similar level. Using two or more of these services below will fill your news aggregation needs.

Percolate - Gathers data from Google Reader, Twitter, and Tumblr. You have the option of getting the summary emails in the morning, morning and afternoon, or none at all. It "bubbles up" the most interesting and shared content of interest to you. The emails are organized nicely and are most similar to Summify's in how it shows who shared it and provides a snippet of the story.

NewsWhip - Tracks the stories published by thousands of news sources then analyzes their social activity. By calculating the speed and scope of their social spread they are able to determine the most engaging and popular news. The number of shares, likes, Tweets, comments, and Facebook activity are used in their algorithm. In addition to viewing their website you can signup for NewsWhip Daily to receive a summary email of the top stories in topics of your choice. The email that comes every three hours can be enhanced by linking your Facebook account to see the news your friends are sharing.

News.me - Sends a daily digest email containing items from your Twitter stream as well as top stories in their network. The email is a nice daily snapshot of top items around, but it is not good at determining relevance to you. This can be a good thing when combined with a more relevance directed service so that you don't miss out on the outside world.

XYDO - (Update: now called Curate.Me.) Provides a daily brief by email that is based on the most interesting people you follow and experts that share your interests. To personalize the email you can follow different communities (interests) in which people post content to in addition to the automated curation feeds. Those are combined with, and prioritized further, based upon your Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, and LinkedIn data.

Know About It - As noted in our previous post it sends a daily email after crunching your Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr streams to determine what interests you. It also can use your RSS feeds (including Google Reader's), Twitter Lists, and people you follow on Disqus. I find the email does a good job of collecting the day's posts, but the item titles tend to be nondescript. It is worth a look especially with its Read it Later and Instapaper integration.

Utopic - This once a day email is a little sparse for me, but suspect if I actively used the service's website more it would be more robust. As it stands it scans my YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader accounts for relevant stories I may have missed. Connecting to and follow other users furthers the curation.

Scoopinion - An email is sent bi-weekly with stories based upon your website article reading history; not your social networks. This is a new service that I have only been using for a week, but I have found to be very good. It works by using a Chrome browser extension to collect your reading data on reviewed and approved news sites (list). It categorizes the articles, then based on what you have read, and where you spent the most time, it tailors the email to provide you with the most interesting stories.

Have you used these services, and if so, what do you think? Are there other ones that you have been using that curate well? Share your comments below.

Know About It Breaks Through The Noise

Know About It aims to help you see the content that is most important to you across your networks and make it easier to stay on top of the topics you care about. Services like Know About It, Summify, and Percolate are working hard to answer the content overload problem. Knowabout.it brings recommendations to the next level with intuitive analysis of multiple data sources to truly show what you want to see, not just aggregated stories that were shared the most.

It starts off by scanning all the links in your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google Buzz streams. Then brings in your RSS feeds (including Google Reader's), Twitter Lists, LinkedIn data, and people you follow on Disqus. Even if you don't have time to read it's recommendations now you can save some for later using the seamless integration with Read it Later and Instapaper. The system learns even more about you when you like or dislike individual items using the web interface.

A daily summary email is sent according to your specifications as well as automatic alerts based on sources or content. Using the filters on the website you can drill down in to the type of media (photo, video), recommendations inside and out of your network, or potentially missed items that come from low volume sources that tend to get lost in the noise.

Give it a try today and let me know what you think. Once you signup and add your sources be sure to give it about an hour to work through your content and learn about you.