Let me just say that it was barely half an hour into my toodling around with this social news application that I totally fell in love with it … hook, line and sinker. So what was it that set my heart a flutter you ask? Well, Skimzee is a wonderfully simple to use, news and social media aggregator that not only gathers news on damned near every subject under the sun but also scans your favorite social networking feeds to find the latest news and opinions on your search subject. Now you may well say that that’s a lot of information for one person to take in but this is where Skimzee plays its masterstroke by offering a summary of the stories that you can investigate with a single click. Skimzee is a free web app that combines summarization technology, a social media search and a thorough web feed aggregation to deliver comprehensive results to your search query. It acts as the single point of contact for subject searching as well as the aggregation of all your favourite articles and lets you view each of them in a concise summary. You can search all your favorite social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook as well as general web pages, news sites, YouTube and Wikipedia. Just click on the “view summary” icon in any search result will give you a summary of the page for that link – all without having to navigate away from the Skimzee page. If a search result has an associated video or photo, you can view it right inside Skimzee and that means any pictures in Tweets or embedded photos or videos in Facebook posts. Skimzee also provides an easy-to use web feed aggregator – just add any feeds of your choice from the settings page and they’ll appear in a drop-down list on the main page. I put in a couple of random searches for Louisville Kentucky and Christian Louboutin shoes (don’t ask) and was delivered a neat, concise selection of feeds and web pages from all my different sources all on the one page. This is pure bliss for the researcher as well as the casual surfer. To be quite honest, I have a feeling that I will use Skimzee as a search engine in future because it delivers everything I want on one page right in front of my eyes. This great search aggregator even gives you the feeds from your social network accounts too which makes it even more interesting. Not only does it summarize your feeds and web stories it also displays any photos, videos and other links to make life even easier. And to cap it all off there’s a bookmarklet and Chrome extension that lets you quickly summarize the page you are viewing with a simple click. I think Skimzee and I are going to be very happy together. Now let me search for that honeymoon destination.
