When you are trying to get your day started with news stories, it seems like you are reduced to catching the news on television, bearing through the weather and the human interest stories before the headlines of the day come.
Your other option is to read the news either in the newspaper or online. However, both sources can come with articles that can run two or even three pages long – reducing the productivity of your day already. Clipped is an app that condenses these articles into three bullet points, saving you time and allowing you to discern between quality articles and fluff.
How Clipped Does It?
As we mentioned before, Clipped is an application that summarizes long articles into three bullet points, always. This is done by using technology that grabs the text from the article, analyzing it with use of grammar, and deciphering the important aspects of the text that is relevant to the subject at hand. Once the important information is grabbed, it is then summarized into the aforementioned three bullet points. That last step, the summarization, is what allows Clipped to spit back at your grammatically correct sentences, instead of just pieced together excerpts.
The Interface
When you open Clipped for the first time, you are presented with the option to sign up through Twitter or Facebook. This will be used in the event that you choose to share an article read in Clipped. Once signed in, you are presented with the top stories for the day. You can pull down and release to get the latest stories. The very top of the screen shows a search bar, with the button on the left side allowing you to log-out of Clipped. Despite being able to see the full article on the homescreen, Clipped allows you to also click to get a larger view of the article. You’ll see a large image, a back button at the top left, and a share button below the image.
Clipped: Compared
Currently, the largest competitor of Clipped is Summly and Circa. When using Circa and focusing on it from a comparison point of view, both applications have a couple of similarities. They are both focused on allowing you to view news in a more condensed form. Despite similar missions (and interfaces), Circa has been in the market a bit longer and in turn comes with more topics for readers to choose from, where Clipped seems to be more in favor of international news headlines. When compared to Summly, however, Clipped is a platform that Tanay Tandon (the developer) is able to implement on other aspects of content consumption, including physical documents.
Finding Clipped Elsewhere
Until the aforementioned point occurs, where Clipped can be implemented in paper documents, you’ll currently find Clipped on your mobile device if it’s an Android or iOS device. On your desktop, Clipped can be found as a bookmarklet or as a Google Chrome Plugin. The desktop addition works similar to the application. When you are viewing an article online, you are able to look at it in Clipped, where a pop-up will show the article now in three bullet points and the title.
Peaks and Flaws
I was a bit apprehensive at first with the thought of Clipped due to how there are already two big player in this market, Circa and Summly. However, the fact that Clipped will be eventually implemented into other aspects of reading, including documents and papers allows for Clipped to grow for the long run.
Focusing more on the app, during my use, I found Clipped to work great with many articles. However, I had a bit of a hard time looking for specific news sources. Just yesterday, I encountered one pitfall with Clipped, the ability for the service to take into consideration other text on the webpage and smaller articles. One article that was Clipped included other text that wasn’t apart of the article. Tandon freely admits that as the platform is growing, like Siri, it will begin improve. This also includes how Clipped handles opinion posts, which is difficult to decipher what is relevant and what isn’t.
You can download Clipped today from the online website and respective application markets.
iOS, Android, Chrome, and Bookmarklet
Disclosure: Despite not working directly with Tandon on Clipped, it is required of me to mention that Tandon participated in the Teens in Tech Incubator program, which is apart of the company I am currently an editorial director for. Aside from this, all views, opinions, and decisions mentioned in this article are personally mine without any influences aside from my own personal use of the app.
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