That idea is very cool, and could be real useful. Btw a site like this, but not geared towards news, does exist: http://synop.it/ .

I could be real simple, too: just a form with Markdown, a URL (to be hashed). Why not do this with Django?

(Btw it doesn't need to take 24 hours, we could get a prototype running in 2 or 3 hours)

Yeah, this project definitely could be done in a couple hours; The budgeting was kinda done "in a vacuum", and includes launching the site, gathering feedback and iterating a bit. Synopt.it is too terse, it's no better than the titles of the articles. I'm looking for something "hacker news comment" length... which is now a unit of measurement.

Neat idea. Could maybe leverage other sources (eg Delicious 'notes' fields, esp. if someone self-notates as a 'summary') until someone first writes a tight proper-style summary. Choice of hard limit for summary size is somewhat arbitrary but will have important influence on culture that emerges.

Getting ahead of things, but an idea for v2: would be interesting to have summaries that apply to entire 'site' (by domain or URL-prefix) or 'site-subsection' (by URL prefix or pattern). When viewing an individual URL summary, you might also want to see (below it) the summaries of each containing context.

@gojomo: good ideas

I suggest we use Google App Engine for this (esp. if we use Django). The form will be as simple as it gets, and we don't really need user registration etc. at first. But if we get lots of small requests (say a Firefox plugin that requests the summary every time someone visits a new URL, or worse, some Greasemonkey script to add the summaries to an HN list), the traffic jam could suck the fun out of using the service.

OK let's get the ball rolling: I've created a wiki for the project:

http://shortenize.wikidot.com/

Drop me an email and I'll send you invites so you can edit pages.

EDIT: my email is my profile, but: francois . AT . fsavard.com

OK if we want to work on this live we'll need to know when everyone is available. I've set up a Doodle poll:

(EDIT: maybe we should wait, as per TimothyFitz availability)

http://www.doodle.com/9ubz79xvmig2fgiw

with my availability in the next 3 days. Notice the timezones, btw.

I think we should try to do a first 2-3 hour coding session and see what comes out. We try to create a working prototype, and if needed we set another session to improve it, etc.

Scheduling 6 people is almost impossible so we'll do our best and we can have coding sessions with different participants.

(Note: I may be a site admin, but these are actually the first projects I'm trying the concept on. So if you have suggestions as to how collaboration should be done, don't hesitate to mention it!).

While I really want to help / co-ordinate this project, I'm moving from Mountain View to San Francisco this weekend, and will have limited / no availability.

OK. Well you're the one who proposed the idea, so as for me it can wait, if you prefer. Until that point we can use the wiki to refine the idea, of course. You think next week will be a better time?

Also see http://www.tinydb.org

check out the following projects:

http://al.linkstore.ru - annotated links http://pn.linkstore.ru - password protected links

TinyDb (see psytek post above) is really nice, but it doesn't allow you to associate info to URLs. And linkstore.ru is more oriented towards notes.

So I've coded a very simple backend so we can start coding userscripts (which are the real work in all of this). It's at: http://shortenize.appspot.com/

The source is linked in the page. It's as simple as it gets (thanks to the App Engine).

By the way the Userscripts could make for easy task division: one or two of us could work on adding summaries to the Hacker News homepage, two others could work on Google Reader, etc.

I suggest creating a google code project for this. I also think you can remove @login_required from line 21.

yet another idea: http://sn.linkstore.ru - secure notes. Destroy content after the first reading

Will this meeting be in SF?

@tectonic: I don't know for others, but I was thinking more of online meetings, chat over SignalFire, IRC, or something similar.

@psytek ok google code repository created: http://code.google.com/p/shortenize. I'll add those who want it as members.

I also coded a bookmarklet as a demo of the functionality: http://shortenize.appspot.com/static/embed.js (see bookmarklet code in comment at the top).

http://freetexthost.com/

http://freetexthost.com/

http://www.copytaste.com/

http://www.shorttext.com/

http://marro.ws/