Summari took a shot at making article summaries on demand a must-have tool for the overloaded reader. But a year later the startup is leaving that model in the dust for a new, and in retrospect way better, use for its summarization service: link previews. And once you give them a shot, you may find them hard to do without.
The original use case had users feed a URL to the service via browser extension, and Summari would generate a summary, naturally, in just a few seconds. Cool, but as they soon found out, it wasn’t enough to make users rely on it.
“Consumer behavior is really hard to change,” admitted Summari founder and CEO Ed Shrager in an interview with TechCrunch. “No one should have to click a button. People loved it, but we never figured out how to monetize it.”
It makes sense: while it’s nice to have a short version of an article now and then, I can’t say I would pay a buck a month for it. Generally if an article...
