I believe we’ve all experienced some of the repercussions that have come from having so much information at our fingertips. We’ve seen plenty of social bookmarking sites pop-up and we’ve also seen interesting developments with social annotating sites like Fleck and Stickis (we compared five social annotation sites here). All are attempting the same task - organizing and categorizing information on the web. Recently, a Y Combinator-backed startup called Awesome Highlighter has started to make a splash.
Awesome Highlighter is a company that provides a tool that enables you to go to a website and highlight information to save for later or share with your friends. The way it works is quite simple. You go to the site and either install the plugin, or type in the URL of the site you’d like to highlight. You pick your color, highlight what’s important, and copy the short URL provided and share it with your friends, or click the “pass it on” button to share your highlights with friends through email, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Del.icio.us, or LiveJournal. I highlighted and annotated a recent TechCrunch post here.
Awesome Highlighter have focused on a simple task, and executed on it very well. Some of their competitors have overly complex processes that require a lot more user involvement than a simple and familiar highlighting and note making procedure. Diigo (previously covered here), a social bookmarking site with a highlighting and annotation feature, is much more social. Diigo allows you to bookmark a site, share it with your friends, and your friends can all highlight and annotate the page.
Several of the highlighting/annotation sites that I tested were very complicated to use and very slow - Diigo, Stickis, and Google Notebook - to be specific. After trying out Stickis, Awesome Highlighter was a breath of fresh air. Highlighting, historically, is one of the simplest things in the world. You have paper with text, and a yellow marker, and you go over important text to make it stick out. Awesome Highlighter has seemingly recreated the simplicity of its inspiration. Stanford’s Academic Technology Specialist Program, recently reviewed Awesome Highlighter, Diigo, and Google Notebook here.
With Awesome Highlighter, a users highlights are available as an RSS feed, which could be mashed-up to use in group collaboration apps or in school environments (follow the smart kids’ highlights instead of making your own). They are currently working on adding some more social features to make better use of the possibilities.
There are a couple less obvious uses, that are just as important, if not more so. What do you get when you provide a tool to users that allows them to highlight important information? You get priceless information that isn’t just views and clicks, you get real data about what people find interesting. This has the ability to arm businesses with information that was previously unavailable. The three founders of the company are currently working on licensing this technology to old media outlets (newspapers and magazines) to encourage people to share stories and provide them with reports on what people think is interesting on their websites.
Now thats something really exciting.
Rajeev Vashisht
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
Looks interesting. Will give it a try. I find bookmarking sites an easy affair these days with both Opera and Firefox doing a great job of syncing all the bookmarks online so they are always available no matter what.
This looks like a copy of http://markkit.net/ which was launched several months ago. Looks like this will get exposure and be successful due to a TC plug.
Lesson for startups: If you are unknown or do not have the contacts to get on TC, rather not go for press. Someone with the contacts will copy your service and get exposure.
@3
Are you going to cry?
Makes me So warm and Fuzzy knowing that we got sites like these that are worthless.
http://www.crunchnow.com
is this a rushed post or what? no info on the guest writer and a tiny crunchbase listing
markkit actually seems like it is implemented a lot better, I can’t get awesome highliter to work on any sites that requrie a login (nytimes, wsj etc.)
@nik my thoughts exactly, i stumbled across the website a few months ago and have been using it since. Was quite surprised to see this post since the service(for me) was nothing new.
Btw the post say’s Guest Author ?
Hmm, very interesting. Thanks for the link!
I know the founders, great guys, they’re from Florida and now are up in Boston working with Y-Combinator. I think they’ve been working on the site for less than a year now, but they’ve come a long way and have a pretty nice UI and overall feel.
Glad to see some Florida boys representing on Techcrunch, besides Luke sending Arrington a screenshot of himself demonstrating Like’s Facebook advertisement
You missed http://fleck.com (from the Dutch guys that broke in Michael Arrington’s house)
Also, awesome highlighter doesn’t seem to work with Opera at all.
Is it just me or does this scream ‘advertorial’?? What’s up TC, is there a church-state going on here? I could be a ‘guest author’ and publish a few things…didn’t realize it was that easy. Where do I sign up?
Tried awsomehighlight a while ago. it is not awsome! does not even work.
Diigo is a lot more robust with highlight and sticky notes, in addition to all its social features.
#10:
“I think they’ve been working on the site for less than a year now”
No way!!! More like a month I guess.
I don’t understand why Google Notebook is mentioned in here at all, except that it’s included in the review that “Guest Writer” linked to. It’s neither a highlighter nor a social annotation service.
Just tried awesomehighlighter - it seemed to work pretty well for me, but I’m using it in Firefox, and haven’t thoroughly tested it out yet. Thanks for the tip - I’m sure my friends will appreciate receiving highlighted tips from me (rather than emailed URLS) when I want to share an article that they would find interesting. I can see this being useful if it spreads around my office - if people started sending me highlights instead of full articles, it would be nice b/c there’s more of a timecrunch at work.
who wrote this? I am missing it, normally dosen’t a guest poster has an intro etc?
this is pretty ordinary technology. I have an internal piece that is running this and will be in my upcoming project soon.
want to add, whats the big deal with highlighting HTML from a technology perspective? Gmail has done it for years. Now if they have developed an algo to make use of the highlighted text, then that’s something else, but it would be a huge invasion of privacy to use my highlighted texts and notes for public and 3rd party use.
I wanna show you,guys something like Awesome Highlighter ,
that is made by korean company , open maru(www.openmaru.co.kr)-
http://www.lemonpen.com/movie/.....height=377
you can see demo video ,open maru’s lemonpen service is very similar with
Awesome Highilghter , and this service already is famous in korea between
blogers
Why not simply send your friend a link with an embedded macro? This Firefox extension works with all kinds of websites and no third party website is involved = 100% privacy.
oh, sorry about the unclosed tag
Techcrunch has sunk to this. Pitiful.
I’m a fan of http://www.ilighter.com - great interface and implementation. They are also from Florida as is my company, WrapMail. Check both out.
Worked for me! Good stuff.
There are so many web highlighting tools available, it’s crazy.
It is becoming a commodity: so they come and go, because nobody has yet found a business model for a web highlighter.
And when they go, so do your bookmarks/highlights.
That’s why I built Yawas on top of google bookmarks.
Give it a try at http://www.yawas.com
Yeah Dave you beat me to it. http://www.i-Lighter.com was presented at Demo 06 and was awarded the coveted Demogod award. Stay tuned for some new things out of i-Lighter coming soon. Theirs is a much better user experience.
I’m a fan of ProtoNotes
http://www.protonotes.com
So who is the Guest Author??
Can we please have disclosure on this
$500?wow, I want do it
This sounds absolutely advertorial.
No offense - but “Guest Poster?” HELLOOO??
Sharedcopy has been around for a long time, and is a fantastic service
Check out sharedcopy.com
Disclaimer: Sharedcopy is done by a friend of mine
sorry for posting again, but after reading the comments, seemed like people agreed. This is really bad for credibility - please kindly consider removing this post.
what a bad taste on sunday morning!
Hey guys it’s Sunday and you get a choice of puff pieces like this or Michael throwing more gas on the Yahoo bonfire.
http://www.imageco.com
“Extreme makeovers for ugly businesses”
the guest poster might be Paul graham
Do any of the services mentioned in the comments here integrate with Delicious? I love the idea, but I really don’t need another pile of bookmarks to manage on yet another site.
what kind of BS is this? Techcrunch has devolved into an ad service for friends of it’s writers. GigaOM is better than this trash. Hey dickheads, try covering something worthwhile; you’re writing about some highlighting service, seriously?
What’s the killer app? I’m flummoxed.
- Cavenger News | Just The Facts
http://awurl.com/vrdlgq97578
Really? It doesnt even highlight images and how do you find it again when you need it? I-’ve been using i-Lighter which actually saves the stuff I want so that I can find it later. and I can email it (just the snippet or the entire page with highlighting in place), post it to my blog, send a tweet, and search for any saved material. #33- it’isnt about saving bookmarks anymore- it’s about saving content!
Yup sounds like an advertorial alright.
Oh yeah 2000 is calling. Third Voice wants their idea back.
sasdasd
Yah - no attribution for who wrote this. Did someone hack the system?
just a quick note to the creators of the service - i believe you folks are doing something very meaningful!
please dun take these comments personally, we are thrashing the journalism style, not the service…
why is this even news?
Is Michael hungover, or what’s with the fact that there’s still no information about this “guest author” and why TC could allow this?
Okay, so it’s a nice article and if anywhere near described a nice tool. And WTF with the “diigo” link being broken and the Stanford one being “FORBIDDEN”. I have it. I’m supposed to sit and marvel at the author’s access to the seedier, I mean higher halls of education.
–Glenn
Interesting that Mr. Yang seems to have trouble organizing his bookmarks
But no kidding, I liked this little tool. I haven’t tried markkit.net - but I will soon
These types of personal productivity tools can make quite a difference for anyone that spends as much time on the web as I do. You see info all the time that you would like to share with folks within the firm and other folks that you frequently collaborate with. Just as often you don’t bother because the typing required to share consumes too much bandwidth, and so the information that could be useful becomes fugitive.
In other words these kinds of tools help extend the conversation around topics that one obviously finds of interest. The thread is often lost to the detriment of any number of stakeholders, but primarily to you. A highlighting tool such as the one described could be a step in the right direction. Allow you to note why you though something was of interest more or less on the fly.
That said, I will be content to lurk until the market votes and the offering grows legs. Just too many distractions on these Internet(s), but this one looks like it could pay dividends.
I guess, they are going to cache the highlighted pages for long time… or just store the highlight data and modify original source when a request is found….
Simplicity is beauty.
Is anyone expecting a site to be perfect by the time TC finds it? They’ll keep iterating and improving, just like the rest of us try to do.