(2011-10-26) Johnson Findings

Steven Johnson's new project is Findings for Social Reading. At its core, Findings is a service that allows you to capture, store, search, and share small snippets of text from eBooks and web pages. It integrates Kindle highlights and web clippings (with more input options to come.) And it gives you the ability to share those quotes with your peers, as well as follow other people’s quotes through your timeline.

There are plenty of other services and apps out there that clip and store text. (When John Borthwick and I first met for lunch, he was using a modified Word Press setup to store his personal quotes.) But with Findings, we are trying to do something that is dedicated explicitly to the task of curating quotations. In other words, it’s not designed to be a broader publishing platform, or a more generic NoteBook app that happens to include quotes every now and then. It’s a social Commonplace Book.

Other recent players: Bob Stein's SocialBooks; ReadMill. (They seem focused only on EBooks.)

They probably need some sort of Twitter integration.

I could see this as one piece of an integrated Thinking Space (and I'd edit entries for WikiWord use), but can't see it as an island. (And I'd need it to integrate into other readers, esp FBReader on Archos70.)

• Mar'2012 update: see 2012-03-29-FbreaderHighlightsControl