

This Post Was Too Long To Read, So We TL;DR’d It - bond
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/18/tldr/

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blackswan
Amazing what putting a flashy UI around an outwardly boring piece of software
can achieve. LIBOTS has been around since 2003 I think... Mint and Yodlee,
Hipmunk and Orbitz - I wonder what other unglamorous services could be
improved with a better UI? Maybe GDS?

Congrats to Jeremy for the coverage - good luck with any plans you have for
TLDR!

~~~
jeremymcanally
Well there's a bit more to it than just OTS. I do a little work on the
summarization part myself then there's also the extraction piece. I did spend
a _few_ hours writing code. :P

Thanks for the congratulations, though; who knew a quick little weekend hack
would get so much coverage? I didn't (hence why I didn't pump up the volume on
the server's resources initially ;)).

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KevinMS
This will fail and I'll tell you exactly why. Longish articles are already
being TL;DR'd by something, called "attention spans". So as this service gets
better and more popular, and I'm not sure exactly how that's possible, the
feeds it will be shortening will already be shortening by pressures from
editors and audiences.

~~~
raganwald
I joke about article length and even satirize myself, but speaking candidly,
the drive towards link-batish titles and articles that simply summarizes other
articles actually encouraged me to write _longer_ pieces, not shorter ones.

It's just simple contrarian thinking. There may be a massive market for blink-
of-an-eye posts that are forgotten in moments, but there is a small niche of
readers who are looking for reading they can savour and dive into.

Naturally, the market for blink-of-an-eye reddit front page posts is many
orders of magnitude larger, but it also has many orders of magnitude more
competition. Niches are smaller but with less competition.

The niche for blowhards may have a small readership, but the more the rest of
the world goes towards tweets, the hungrier those readers are for that 141st
character of exposition.

JM2C.

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drtse4
Jeremy, an obvious suggestion, keep track of the traffic/traffic sources data,
add adwords/amazon/etc... as soon as possible and do a series of blog posts on
it. The traffic directed to your personal blog could turn out to be more
valuable than the one going to tldr.it (i'm thinking about promotion of future
projects).

Update: I don't know how much you can tweak the algorithm for a single site,
but fixing the result of this:

[http://tldr.it/summarize/?summary[url]=http://www.reddit.com...](http://tldr.it/summarize/?summary\[url\]=http://www.reddit.com/)

and submitting it to reddit ("Reddit? tl;dr it.") is what i would do now :).

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sbierwagen
I was hoping it would also cut boring posts from RSS feeds entirely.

The only thing preventing me from subscribing to the big news sites like
techcrunch or the register is the sheer volume. I could subscribe to one feed
that updates seven times a day, or to _fifty_ blogs that update once a week.
Subscribing to more than one big site just isn't worth it.

Something that would remove boring posts from rss feeds would be pure gold.

~~~
jeremymcanally
That is another app idea I have that I plan on implementing when I get the
time. I have the algorithms planned and so on, but who knows if I'll ever have
the time to make it happen. :/

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ibejoeb
Well, I tried it out on with a few very mainstream sources. It appears that it
just takes the first few sentences. I was led to believe that it somehow
extracted meaningful information, sort of like Amazon's SIPs.

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DevX101
Sites currently down.

If you're going to be featured by TechCrunch or big media, please contact your
hosting provider and make sure you can handle the hits. This is exactly the
WORST time to have your site down.

~~~
jeremymcanally
It should be up now actually. I doubled the resources on my box but I'm also
getting hit with Twitter traffic from popular Twitter users. :/

I switched to nginx which seems to handle the traffic much better!

(Also: I asked them to hold this story til Wednesday so I could do a few
things and check the stability of the app. Oops. ;))

