I’ve been working with GreatSummary.com to create a Firefox extension for their service (a webpage summarizer), and yesterday, we submitted the first version of the extension to addons.mozilla.org. With the way that the new AMO site is configured, all new addons are initially placed in the “sandbox,” where they must be peer-reviewed before being eligibile for editor review, which grants public availability. To view sandboxed addons, users must be logged in and have the sandbox enabled in their preferences (it’s disabled by default).
Because it is highly unlikely that someone will stumble across the GreatSummary extension while it is sandboxed, I’d appreciate it if anyone who has an AMO account could take 5 minutes to download the GreatSummary extension and give it a quick review. Reviews don’t need to be long – just a few sentences describing how the addon worked for you.
It’s a simple addon – it adds a “Summarize this page” menu option to the Tools menu and the page’s context menu; clicking that option opens a new tab with the summary of the current page. I’ve found that it works the best on pages with lots of text, like in-depth Wikipedia articles.
I installed it and gave it a review. It works great in Netscape Navigator 9.0b1. I agree with your comment that a page with more text works better, but it works reasonably well with news articles on CNN and blog postings.
It won’t work on the New York Times Website. It always says that there is not enough content. You have to copy the articles then paste them into text box to have it summarized.