I tried a couple of articles on Washington Post and the algorithm did a decent job. I then read the gist first before reading an article, and while some sentences were a little hard to understand w/o the surrounding context, I felt I still got a decent summary. I can see myself skimming the article through this service instead of relying solely on my eye balls when scanning through.
Couple of suggestions:
- Linking the extracted sentences back to the original page if I want the surrounding context - A tool/browser plug-in which can allow me to select a representative sentence from the story and submit to gist
Seems like a useful stand alone service as it is; having people vote on and submit gists themselves would be cherry on top.