Song of The Day: Swallow - Artist: Supreme Beings of Leisure



Lately, I’ve been checking out an iPhone application from Summize and, I have to say, I really like the service and application. First things first however, what is Summize?

Summize, the company, is a start-up in the Northern Virginia area. The service they provide connects users with opinions and reviews from the Web, focusing on blogs and other reviews. From Summize’s homepage:

Summize connects you with the opinions of millions of people on zillions of products. We scour the web for the latest user reviews and blogger discussions, surmise their sentiments, and summarize them here.

Summize epitomizes Web Think. Want to see how Summize brings Web Think to you? On your mobile?

More thoughts and screenshots after the jump…

So Summize is starting to tackle the grand challenge problem of summarizing the Web’s thoughts on products, movies, music, books, etc. A few years back this may have seemed near impossible, but with the advent of blogs and long tail trends, Summize is mining all that additional thinking in order to provide snapshots with the tap of an iPhone.

So how are they doing it? TechCrunch already wrote about Summize’s beta launch last November, so feel free to read that for an overview of the algorithm and sentiment bar. I will briefly add for this article, for those not willing to jump, the sentiment bar is a color-coded image indicating likes and dislikes for a particular review.

My blog entry will focus on the experience with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

With the Oscars last weekend I couldn’t help but focus on the movie reviews. So with a tap of the Movie button I immediately received sentiments indicative of what happened at the The Oscars without needing to have seen it:



At the top was There Will Be Blood, which most would know as the movie that Daniel Day-Lewis won for Best Actor. Also in the top three was No Country for Old Men and Michael Clayton, both of which won Oscars.

Another tap and the review surfaces.



From the review screen the summary displays how many reviews liked the movie, those that didn’t, and links to thoughts on the Web. For There Will Be Blood 197 opinions popped up with 72% positives, 17% negatives, and 11% so-so. The overall buzz heightened recently, as would be expected with Oscar buzz.

Pretty impressive.

The music and book reviews will usually show useful pricing information from say Amazon; however, I didn’t see any pricing information for movies. Perhaps, that is in the works for those movies offered on DVD, etc.

As far as long-term mobile use, I gauge a product on how willing I am to keep coming back to the application. For example, Facebook, like it or not, is extremely sticky with its messaging, feeds, updates, etc. Something to experience daily!

I did found myself compelled to browse Summize’s trends on Music and Books and even tried to perform a search on thoughts concerning Google’s stock price drop recently. :)

Although there wasn’t too much helpful on GOOG, I think this points to how Summize could become even stickier in the future on a mobile device: daily reviews and trends of more ephemeral topics like stocks, news, etc.

However, I will be checking back periodically and I’m sure Summize has a bunch in the works.

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