Skimzee is another free tool to help you combat information overload on the Internet. Via web site, bookmarklet or Chrome Extension, you can summarize most news stories, content from YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, Wikipedia, and control the size of the summary with an adjustable slider. The site also incorporates an RSS finder/reader function in that it allows you to search for feeds, add them and create groups of them from the Settings page accessible at the little gear icon at the upper right on their site. You can get the summaries from your home page – hover over the results and click to expand the “view summary” link. Some will not show that link – particularly if the site is behind a paywall, or uses Javascript, or is password protected.
A Latest Stories drop down on the Feeds tab lets you browse by subject. You can also click on trending or latest videos, or Facebook feed or wall, if you set up your Skimzee to access such content. Search tab allows you to enter search terms or a specific URL for summary treatment. A drop down arrow next to the search box allows you to select / deselect your target content. Skimzee also prompts you with popular page links at the top. The settings page from the gear button allows you to customize your Skimzee experience, including what page is summarized when you navigate to Home, what feeds to show at startup, what Summary Bookmarks to include along the top, what and how to summarize via the bookmarklet or extension as you browse the Web, what RSS feeds to include and how to show them, and more.
There are other tools out there that help you make sense of the Web by personalizing your experience and showing you news deemed of interest to you. Skimzee takes a different approach by giving you access to all the news, albeit in shortened, summarized form. If that is your preferred method of parsing, then Skimzee might be of interest. Check it out – and check back in. Would love to hear what you think.
Advocate's Studio 
Nice to see your review of Skimzee. I’d better say right up front that I’m the developer of this app, so feel free to delete this comment if you’re not happy having the author comment on his own app!
By the way, it brought back some good memories seeing the mention of the old Radio Shack TRS-80 in your ‘About The Advocate’ section. I had one of those too as my first computer. I remember starting it up first time, watching the blinking cursor and thinking I somehow had something of incredible power at my fingertips, the only limit was going to be my imagination – that and the 16K of memory!
Anyway, about Skimzee … I started working on the ideas behind this app earlier this year and have spent many long days (and nights) working on new techniques, algorithms, frameworks, architectures, UI designs etc. etc. I originally thought I’d have a prototype by about May – June time, but, well, you know how it is! I’d wanted to create something that was a cross between search and feed, but with a really good summarization service built in and an orientation towards social media. The summarization and text parsing algorithms are really unique and took me a long time to develop. It’s early days yet, but it’ll be interesting to see what kind of reaction there is to it.
Glad to get your input Don – it is nice to read the back story on a web tool. I think you have something interesting here and hope it gets some traction.