Summize Blog

Twitter Search

We have been tracking ways people express their opinions and ideas on the web. One of the coolest ways people are sharing information now is Twitter. There are already a few ways for others to see this data now like Twitter's public timeline. If you want to search it there is already TweetScan that is pretty cool and you should check it out, but not being able to understand the message thread was a problem for us. There is Quotably for that, but search is still needed to find things and bouncing back and forth was a pain. Lastly, all the different languages out there makes it hard to find some things.

Summize for the iPhone

The iPhone has been all the buzz around Summize HQ this week. We released a new version of Summize for the iPhone and Apple announced their new iPhone model with 16GB of memory.

Summize for the iPhone packs a lot of sentiment into a tiny space. You can search and find summarized reviews on millions of products or discover something new in the latest trending music, movies and books.

Improved Item Experience

We overhauled the item experience on Summize this week for things like movies, books, gadgets and such. Here is a look at the improved experience for In Defense of Food. We've created a new overview section at the top of the page. It includes a picture of the item, the key people (author Michael Pollan), a summary of the positive vs negative opinions and additional facts.

We moved blog reviews down the page just below the overview section. The blog section features up to 10 of the most helpful reviews. We're still working out what makes a review helpful or not so feel free to click the yes or no links to give us feedback. For example here is a look at the helpful blog reviews for In Defense of Food.

We're continuing to add new features, so stay tuned.

New Summize.com

We launched a new and improved beta version of Summize.com this week. Starting with the homepage you'll immediately notice a bold new look:

Then as you scroll down the page, notice there is a new section highlighting trending artists, actors and authors. We determine these trends by constantly scouring and analyzing blogs and websites for recent mentions. As products and people are mentioned they are added to our trends list. You can also find a link to the full trends list at the top of every page, just to the right of the Summize logo.

If you click on one of the trending topics you'll find a new type of page that showcases the many things we've gathered about the topic or person. For example take a look at the Sarah McLachlan page.  Starting at the top you'll find the most reviewed, most liked and most buzzed products featuring Sarah.

Afterglow is her most reviewed work, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy is her most liked album and her holiday album, Wintersong, is the most buzzed or discussed. Moving down the page we've pulled together a collection of recently reviewed and discussed products, from Surfacing to Mirrorball:

Further down the page we've pulled in recent mentions, videos, mp3s, websites and related products.

On the upper right side of the page you'll find the overall opinion for all Sarah McLachlan products:
 
Followed by bloggers who've recently mentioned her, then related topics, for example fellow Canadian musician Loreena McKennitt.

All the sections of this new page work together to create a comprehensive discovery experience. We hope you find the new page useful. If you have any suggestions please let us know.

Comparing with Summize

I've been doing lots of online window shopping this week, trying to find the best gifts for my friends and family. And I've found a favorite new Summize feature that lets you compare reviews and opinions on just about anything.  All you have to do is enter the letters "vs" for versus between the topics you want to compare. For example my cell phone contract is up in a few days and I've been looking at new phones. My sister-in-law raves about her new Blackberry, but I'm partial to Palm so I searched for "treo vs blackberry."
Looking at that comparison I may give the Blackberry another look.

I'm also trying to figure out what to get my nieces and nephews. For the girls I looked at "high school musical vs hannah montana." With 79% great reviews it looks like something related to Hannah Montana might be a good choice. And comparisons aren't limited to just two topics, you can compare as many topics as you like. For example I compared "dora the explorer vs elmo vs bob the builder" for my younger nieces and nephews.

For fun I started comparing musicians and celebrities. There has been so much buzz about Amy Winehouse this year. I compared her to fellow 2007 MTV Video Music Award nominees: "amy winehouse vs lily allen vs carrie underwood vs gym class heroes." Amy had the highest percentage of great reviews at 77%, but apparently that wasn't enough since Gym Class Heroes won the 2007 VMA for Best New Artist. And while Britney Spears might be losing the custody battle with K-Fed, she easily wins the review battle on Summize: "britney spears vs kevin federline."
70% wretched reviews for Mr. Federline must sting a bit.

The comparison possibilities are endless...If you find any interesting ones let me know.

Summize: Now with more Cowbell

The last time we announced a new feature was in August. But that isn’t our newest feature; as Jay mentioned last week we’ve been quite busy in the intervening months. The amount of sentiments and reviews on the internet is astounding and we’ve been working to integrate all those we find. For example do a search for "iPhone" and you’ll notice there are now different types of reviews including bloggers and experts.  

Other examples to try include "Sony Cybershot" or "Icky Thump." From there you can click on the blogger links to read the full blog posts.

And you can add your own reviews for various items by clicking on the plus sign:

Stay tuned as we add more cowbell over the next few weeks.

William Hung: Love Him or Hate Him

Today we released a new beta feature on Summize that let's you quickly see the products people love, hate, and disagree on.

Let's jump right into an example.  First, search for rock music cds:

Which retrieves a list 529,321 reviews on over 20,000 products!  That's a lot of reviews to read if we're just trying to find some new music to check out.

Now notice the beta feature in the right-hand column labeled "Read enough reviews?". Clicking "what people love" quickly re-orders the products to show you just the rock CDs that people love:

The majority greenness of the snips is a conspicuous indicator that most people agree with each other about the high quality of this music — other sites would give these CDs "five stars".  Conversely, if you click "what people hate" you will see the music everyone generally agrees is bad (i.e., "one star").

But check out the snippet for OK Computer in the screenshot above: it says, "people are all different and have different likes and opinions".  For many types of products, such as music, what the "crowd" thinks may not reflect your own tastes, or the product features that are most important to you.

So click on "what people disagree on":

The snips say it all: you can immediately see that user opinion is divided on these products, with William Hung's album topping the list as the CD people disagree about the most.  Other sites would average out this polarizing love and hate to arrive at an average "three star" rating, and bury the CD far down in the search results.

On Summize, however, we highlight this CD as a quintessential example of why we write reviews in the first place: to express our individual opinions. Disagreement does not make a product average; rather, products that foment the crowd's disagreement are often the products that we are most passionate about as individuals.  We predict you will either love or hate William Hung's... music — only 8% of people said it was just "OK".

This feature is still in beta (meaning we get it wrong sometimes), but as disagreement is such an essential ingredient of user reviews, we felt our site would not be complete without it.  Please give us your feedback as we continue to improve.

Snips for the Color Blind

Today we released a new color blind mode on Summize: read all about it.

Color blindness (or color deficiency) affects about 10% of males (and <1% of women).  Take a look at how this Summize snip may appear to users with the most common variety of color deficiency, deuteranomaly ("green weakness"):

Yikes! As you can see, it is difficult to distinguish wretchedness from greatness from badness from swellness — only the yellow hue of so-so-ness differentiates itself.  The effect is particularly distressing when looking at buzz:

The noteworthy transition from green to red user sentiment is completely lost.

In color blind mode, snips are rendered from black-to-white rather than red-to-green.  Grayscale snips address all varieties of color blindness (even true color blindness of the rare monochromat).

This is the nutshell; please visit the color blind mode page on Summize to read a full account of our effort.

As you can imagine, after the initial launch of Summize we received "hate mail" from many visually distraught color blind users (one such user regarded our site a "torture chamber for the color blind").  To those users: we thank you for your advice and good humor; your feedback has gone directly into the new design.

What do you think?