The 15-Year-Old Creator Of The Trimit App Makes Regular Old Entrepreneurs Seem Like Slackers

Kit Eaton:

Trimit's a recent $0.99 app for the iOS platform that does one simple thing very well: It boils down longer-form Net content into 1,000-, 500-, or 140-character summaries. The longer summaries are meant to be handy for people pressed for time to read bigger articles, perhaps during a commute, and the shorter summaries make it easy to share the body text of interesting content (more than just a "hey this is good!" introduction to a link in an email or tweet) on the web, with the 140-character limit obviously tailored for Twitter. It's also useful for deciding if you want to, later, read a long-form article.

Its design taps into the same thinking as web acryonyms like LOL and TWSS, and there's more than a little nod in the direction of hyper-abbreviated SMS language. Perhaps this thinking was boosted because the chap behind it is just 15.

App creator Nick D'Aloisio tells Fast Company that he came up with the idea for the app during exam studies when he was "required to research a vast amount of webpages." Nick realized that while poring over sites was "browsing a lot of pages that were, in fact, irrelevant to the task and therefore wasting" a lot of his time. Thus the aha moment, where he realized a quick precis of a website could be invaluable in helping you decide if you wanted to browse the rest of it. D'Aloisio stressed that the intention really is to "aid users in consuming content on the web" rather than sharing it socially, though this is a natural benefit of its design.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 15, 2011 1:29 AM
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