[LMG] Issue 1: Why make an app?
These holidays, I started making an app. It wasn’t a spontaneous decision. I had been thinking about it for years.
It started when I started saving articles from the internet to read in my free time. First on diigo, then Pinboard, then Pocket, then Instapaper, and a few other little experimental apps I’ve forgotten (and which probably aren’t accessible now). I realised, hundreds of articles in, that I didn’t really have a way to revisit what I had read. Worse still, I didn’t even have an easy way to retrieve all the thoughts I had when I read what I read. And I was far from having a consistent way of linking what I read.
The current best services for highlighting and annotating, in my experience, are: 1) Pocket, which was great for reading but didn’t have highlights (back then). 2) Instapaper, which was great for highlighting, but not very good for getting highlights out of the service into anything else. 3) Readmill, which was bought by Dropbox in 2014 and scuttled. This was, arguably, the first social reading app that made an impact. And I had been hoping for someone to recreate the experience.
If your impression of “social reading” brings to mind Facebook, Twitter and other services, you are way off. That already exists, and it is closer to “social sharing”. Facebook and Twitter don’t make it easy to have meaningful conversations around discrete bits of reading which are easily referenced later.
Readmill was shaped primarily around that. The first thing it brought was a permalink to each highlight you made. A permalink is short for a “permanent link”, a bit of text that you can send to someone, paste into the address bar of a web browser, and be taken to a webpage that you want them to see.
A Readmill highlight on the Readmill webpage (with a permalink)
These highlights (optionally) appeared in-location in the mobile apps. You could choose to have them off, for focused reading, or to have them on, for the serendipitous experience of meeting someone else who has something to say about what you are reading.
A Readmill highlight in the Readmill app
The social reading experience seemed gimmicky at first, but the turning point came for me when Clive Thompson, who had just published Smarter Than You Think, started replying to notes and comments in his book. Being able to speak with the books author on specific highlights was world-changing. You could ask questions about points in the book that weren’t clear to you, and have the author clarify it right there. You could mention something it reminds you of, and have the author point you to an article they read or wrote about the same idea. And these were available to other users of the service. Better yet, their correspondence with the author was available to you too! I regret not taking screenshots of some of the exchanges I had; I never expected I would need them at some point.
Even without the social reading experience, simply having a permalink to each highlight, and your notes on it, is immensely helpful for having conversations online, with people. The web has similar approaches, such as Medium’s highlights feature. But none of them enable a deeper conversation around that discrete bit of highlighting; Medium does not even provide a permalink.
I want permalinks for all my highlights, and I am going to have to make them myself if no one will provide them.