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.

Five Useful Daily Emails

Fwix has a daily email that sends you 5 local stories from the location of your choice. Their service scours websites, blogs, and social media sites for stories that are geographically related to the area you have selected. Just head over to the site and enter a location, or let it locate you, then click on "Subscribe" to signup for the email. I really like this service because the email is always waiting for me when I wake up and I get to quickly see some local headlines.

Qwiki is a new way of learning things on the web. It pulls information from a number of sources to combine them in to a fluid presentation. Text is spoken, images fade in and out, and video is added to an engrossing experience. When you sign-up you can elect to have a daily email sent of the "Qwiki of the Day". The subjects range in topic and are often tied to current events or anniversaries. Some of the most resent ones were Nelson Mandela, WikiWikiWeb, Spring, and Libya. I always learn something new when I watch these.

heyAstro is new and brings a refreshing take on the daily summary email by offering up targeted information. The morning email has your local weather for today and tomorrow, Google calender events, daily deals for your location, Facebook friends' birthdays, local news, Intsagram photos from friends, viral news, and your horoscope. The email comes with all your selected items formatted in a nice readable format. The Facebook birthdays is a great feature along with everything else; this is becoming one of my favorite emails.

Summify is a perfect way to help you follow news and events. This daily email, more often if you choose, combines and finds the most important and talked about stories from your Google Reader, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. I opted for the every 8 hour email and I really like getting a check of what is being talked about most.

SignOff is at the other end of your day being the last email you receive. It offers three top stories you may have missed, three that you should watch out for tomorrow, and if you can't sleep three more. The email comes around 10:00 PM and is a good quick read of the days top stories because they offer a couple bullet points from the stories with links to the full story if you want to know more.

These 5 daily emails will help you stay on top of everything while not cluttering your inbox. Do you use these or other services? If so, which ones do you like?

How To Follow News And Stories Online Without The Overload

With everything I read being online I have had to become very efficient in the way I manage and interact with news and articles. When you replace your local TV news, the national news, magazines, newspapers, trade publications and everything else with the digital world you can quickly become buried in a mountain of unread stories. The number of applications and website claiming to organize all this can add to your anxiety. News is generated from hundreds of sources around the web and going to each one is impossible.

What can you do? The most important things are organization and non-duplication. You do not need to see the same story in three different locations just because the source publishes to all of them. If you follow my blog you should pick the one source that works for you; not all five.

Lets run through the primary tools I use to consume the news:

1) Twitter - This should be used for your breaking news and important resources that are time sensitive. It is best to keep the number of accounts your follow to under 100. Anymore than that you will be missing news because you can not keep up. Don't forget; just because you are not following them on here does not mean you can not follow them somewhere else. If you are following over 100, try to find some of your less urgent sources and track them another way.

2) RSS Feed Reader) - RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and the feed is usually designated by an icon like this . I have found it to be the number one way to read and organize my information intake. You are able to follow major news websites, blogs, and pretty much any website that posts stories and updates. You can even follow news aggregators like Google News so that you do not have to go to the site directly. Just look for the RSS icon at the bottom of the page you are on to find the feed (this is the one for Top Stories). Keep in mind not to subscribe to any sources you already follow on Twitter. Within any reader you can organize your feeds and I suggest you do so to group subjects and interests. Don't be afraid of clicking the "mark all as read" button; if you have over 500 items to read click the button to get a fresh start. The sooner you realize that you can not read everything the happier and less stressed you will be.

3) Facebook - My news here is my friends and family only. If I like pages I hide them from my news feed to avoid information overload as things I like I already read on Twitter or in Google Reader. If you like getting your news here that is fine of course, but don't also follow it on Twitter or subscribe by RSS. If I find a compelling post or article I want to comment on from another source I can go to that page on Facebook to find the story.

4) Email - It can't be beat for daily digest emails and is an excellent way to control what information you get. You can even have some websites email you the stories instead of subscribing via RSS. Depending on the sources email frequency you can use email for urgent or low priority news like opinion articles. One thing I like to do is to get an email every eight hours from Summify. Summify scans my Twitter, RSS, and Facebook accounts to find the most important stories and is a easy way for me to ensure I do not miss important stories.

5) Buzz - I check it once or twice a day for the comments. The Buzz crowd is a insightful and thorough group of commenters. Most of the stories I would have already seen because 99% of the post are imports from Twitter and blog RSS feeds.

Happy reading! Do you consume news and information in a different way? Let everyone know what works for you in the comments section below. I am always trying new applications, extensions, and websites that claim to be able to organize the information better, but I have not been able to find one that improves on what I do above. Have you?