By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

ROCKVILLE, Md.—According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, social sharing grows exponentially as time goes on; users share twice as much today as they did one year ago. A year from now that figure will double, and so forth. The amount of information shared in more than one stream is overwhelming, so how can you manage to stay on top of the information that is important to you when it is streaming at you from so many different directions?

The desire to ingest more and more information grows with each social media site you sign up for to the point where one can reach "social media overload." That's where a new tool called "Summify" comes in. Summify automatically identifies the most important news stories for you across all your networks. It's like a "hyper" RSS reader. When you plug in your social accounts, say on Google +, Facebook and Twitter, their algorithm collects the links that show up in your feeds, filters them and sends you a summary. Duplicate content is removed, items you typically ignore or don't "click" on are removed and items with subject matter you have shown interest in in the past are included in the feed. Right now, the only social accounts Summify can help with are Twitter, Facebook and Google, but more sites like LinkedIn will be accessed in the future.

Currently, Summify only collects links to articles, but will soon include links to video and audio as well. Summify pays special attention to the content that has been "liked" and "shared" by friends in your network and while global amounts of "likes" and "shares" are considered, Summify's algorithm is weighted to your likes and likes within your network. As you use Summify, the algorithm learns more about you and alters your feed with the purpose of providing you what it believes is more of the information you want to see.

For me, Summify has made my Facebook and Twitter experience more user friendly. It reduces the amount of time I spend scouring my feeds for internet marketing information, music or international news, enhancing my social media experience. It has also changed the way I get my news. Every morning I have an email with five articles Summify's algorithm thinks I'd be interested in reading and I estimate about 80 percent of the information Summify provides falls within my areas of interest. Summify estimates that for every story that makes it into a feed they reject 150 other less relevant stories. Prior to Summify I had to filter through a ton of garbage to get to find information I might be interested in. Summify has the advantage of being incredibly easy to use and the news is there when I want it. I am excited to see how Summify evolves and improves, refining my information gathering abilities.

Alan N. Glazier, OD, FAAO is the founder/CEO of Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care in Rockville, Md. A search and social optimization consultant, he is now a regular contributor to CLICK and also writes a regular blog for SightNation.com. Glazier is at aglazier@youreyesite.com and his regular posts can be found via his Twitter handle: @EyeInfo, his blog: eyeinfo.wordpress.com and his website: YourEyeSite.com. Author: Searchial Marketing: How Social Media Drives Search Optimization in Web 3.0.