Mac 101: Shorten text using the Summarize Service

There's a great MacBreak episode with Leo and Kenji Kato talking about Summarize.
http://twit.tv/mb62

worked great on this blog
worked horrible on news.google.com > click article > printer friendly

I just used it on this blog post, and you're right: it's scary!

I think it just gets rid of blocks of text,
if there are many paragraphs, it gets rid of paragraphs then sentences,
but if there are not that many, it removes sentences,
but it never deletes or moves any words
it usually keeps a sentence or a paragraph located closer to the top
and removes ones in the mid- last region...

I wrote and tried to use the following:

And in the end, the verdict handed to the guilt-ridden culprit was sufferable compared to the months of seemingly endless arbitration and litigation endured by the determiners of said verdict.

and nothing happened...(I had just read the latest in the Psystar case...)

Is there someway I can apply this during conversations or management presentations?

Well you just made my twitter experience a lot better!

That's an amazing tip. I wonder whether it'll be any good at producing abstracts. I'm curious though, why would somebody code this into Mac OS? I mean I can understand producing a separate program and advertising it as a quick way to summarize things but it seems a little odd to add this into the operating system but not actually advertise it as a feature.

http://gadgetsgamesandstuff.blogspot.com

"In many applications such as Safari, Pages, and TextEdit, you can select a block of text and click the application name in the menu bar > Services > Summarize.


Once you're in the summarize service, you can quickly and easily shorten the selected text by moving the slider between 1% and 100%. "

I preferred this summary.

When I use the summarize function to 1% on this blog post it also keeps the 'main' point of the text:

[quote]
In many applications such as Safari, Pages, and TextEdit, you can select a block of text and click the application name in the menu bar > Services > Summarize.
[/quote]