I often find myself reading long blog posts and articles only to find out that I already knew most of what was discussed. Other times, I find out that the topic wasn't really relevant to my interest. Indeed, headlines are often misleading.

That's what lead me to the following idea: a browser add-on that would overlay short and concise TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) summaries over web pages. The system would be community driven and moderated: anyone could add their own summary of the content and the best TL;DR messages would be up voted by the community. Additionally, as suggested by Jason, authors could be allowed to write their own official summary.

My bet is that this system could be valuable to people faced with too much information and too little time. It could be successful in the same way Twitter's 140 characters limit contributed to its success: reducing information overload and increasing signal-to-noise ratio.

As anticipated, there is already a good deal of browser add-ons for annotating web pages, but none of them explicitly promote the usage that I am describing. I will be working on this little add-on in my free time and hope it'll eventually gain enough traction to really become useful. I'm open to constructive criticism and suggestions: just leave your thoughts in the comments !

TL;DR: Community-driven Firefox add-on that overlays short summaries next to long texts.