Yes, it's similar to the "summary" area provided by most social bookmarking sites. But as we all know, that's an area that very few users take the time to complete - or they choose to fill the area with the first sentence of the content being saved. It's rarely a summary.

Synop.it is designed expressly to capture those summaries, encouraging contributors to distill the content in a way that gives the reader context for the story as a whole. And if they find a summary that doesn't do the article justice, they're encouraged to help revise it. It's like the wiki way meets social bookmarking.

As far as drawbacks go, there's no way to judge the how one "takeaway" compares to another. Without a voting mechanism or ranking, readers may struggle to find the best summaries of content. But, users can deduce some of that information based on how many times the summary has been revised - and who has done the revising. And if the service develops a following of regular users, the on-going curation of the takeaways may make this a non-issue.

As a new service, Synop.it is still sparse in terms of content. But there's a great deal of potential here for beginning to catalogue the Web in a way that directly complements the activities of millions of social bookmark contributors. More importantly, it's an opportunity for a different kind of cataloguing that - when used in combination with other types of categorizing - can provide semantic clues for us to better understand the information around us.

If you're interested in reading some of the synopses or trying your hand at distilling Web content into a short paragraph, give Synop.it a try. Getting started is as easy as registering and adding a bookmarklet to your browser.

I loved that site and am very sad to see it go. The service was a lot of fun to use. Given how recently the company has received substantial media attention and how loyal its small group of users was, this was a real surprise. Can high-end websites for thinking people ramp up and monetize quickly? This news makes you wonder.

You've reached this page because, at the moment, Brijit is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words. We're working hard to find a way forward for our service and hope to relaunch in the not-too-distant future. Thanks to all our loyal readers and writers. And to our Brijit writers: payments in full for all abstracts published through May 15 will be made next week.

As you can see from the Compete graph below, traffic was trending up at Brijit after an initial media spike. The company has a really compelling system of "assignments" for review writers and the end result is a great crib-sheet for anyone headed to the periodicals section of a local bookstore on the weekend.

Brijit content is still available on the website here. You can read our previous coverage here. A great article about Brijit in the Washington Post is here. The Post reported in October that the company had raised $1 million in funding. Did it already burn through that, $5 at a time, or has something else happened?

I really hope that this isn't another signal that only lowest-common denominator content is able to monetize and scale online these days. It's hard not to think that Brijit's management must have drastically miscalculated somewhere. A million dollars aint what it used to be, though. Either way, the web will be a less wonderful place if Brijit goes belly up for good.