Yahoo! just announced that it has acquired Summly, an iPhone app that delivers news about the things you care about at a glance.  Though the Summly app will disappear, its features will live on in Yahoo’s mobile experience as founder Nick D’Aloisio and the rest of the Summly team join Yahoo.

So how will the Yahoo mobile experience benefit from a Summly injection?

The technology

Summly started with a simple extraction algorithm to deliver concise and coherent summaries of news then innovatively used machine learning and natural language processing, as well as evaluation metrics to hone the service.  And to perfect the app, Summly partnered with SRI International.

Summarized content

First, you choose what topics interest you.  After that, summarized news of your interest will be presented to you by Summly.  It features photos and a brief summary of articles.  But if you want to read more about it, you can either read the extebded summary or read the full article with a double tap or swipe on the screen.

Tiles

Tiles make it easy for users to see categories as well as organize them.  Blue tiles are customizable tiles which allows users to customize new topics and sources for each category.  Green tiles aggregate topics based on keywords you’ve entered.

Navigation

Topics of interest are organized into tiled categories.  If you want to update a category, just drag the tile to the right.  To browse the headlines, just tap on the right of the tile.  Tap on a headline to view the summary, double tap to see a longer summary, or swipe down to read the full article.  If you want to return to the category tiles, just swipe up on the screen and if you want to browse more summaries, just swipe right or left.

Sharing

Summly is quite social as well, as it lets you share summaries on Facebook, Twitter or e-mail by just holding down anywhere on the screen.  By holding down on the screen, the share option which consists of four on-screen buttons pops up, facilitating for easier sharing.  Aside from sharing summaries on Twitter, you can also use Summly to summarize your Twitter stream.  You can even have a tile dedicated to your Twitter stream to easily view what’s happening on Twitterdom.

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Summly’s edge

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Since Google officially announced the demise of Google Reader, other content aggregators such as Feedly, have been top choices for Google Reader replacement.  Feedly is easy to setup and Google Readers can easily migrate their preferences to Feedly.  It also doesn’t hurt that Feedly is available on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, as well as iOS and Android devices so you never miss out on the things you deem important.

Given that there are already a lot of news aggregators to choose from, what would Summly bring to Yahoo to make people drop other services like Feedly or Flipboard?  The comprehensive summaries is one feature that sets Summly apart, combined with easy navigation for browsing feeds as well as discovering new content.  As Yahoo continues to build out its efforts for consumerized Services, Summly’s edge will further these goals.