That headline doesn't have a typo. Findings is a relatively new service that gives you another way to share your Kindle highlights and, more importantly for me, save/share clips from any website you visit. I discovered Findings at the terrific Books in Browsers (BiB) event at the Internet Archive last week. If you missed the BiB livestream you'll be able to watch the archive of all the sessions shortly. Keep an eye on this link for the videos and, in the mean time, you can grab a PDF of the tweets from BiB here or see a realtime list of the tweets here.
I add highlights to pretty much every Kindle book I read and that Findings feature is nice. It's the website clips capability that really has me jazzed though. Like most of you, my coworkers and friends are always sending me links to interesting articles, blog posts, etc. I love Instapaper and use it every day to archive many of these links for later reading. But what if I just want to grab a sentence or a paragraph from that article or post? That's where Findings shines. After all, saving an entire article is nice but if I can narrow it down to just the excerpt I found most interesting, well, that's a service I'd pay for! You won't have to though as Findings is completely free.
I'm just getting started with Findings as I've only snagged a few excerpts so far. That number is about to grow significantly as I added the Findings bookmarket to all my browsers and will use it frequently. The next time I'm scratching my head, wondering where I read something about this before, I'll quickly hop over to my Findings stream to find out. You should too. Findings is one of those services that seems so simple and obvious but it's something we've all been living without for way too long.
P.S. -- Many thanks to Peter Brantley, Kat Meyer and Brewster Kahle for the wonderful BiB experience. If you're fortunate enough to get an invitation to a future BiB I suggest you do two things: immediately accept it and get ready for an extremely inspiring event!
Joe, thanks for sharing this with us. I've found the same frustration of capturing items of interest and this is an easy solution.
Posted by: waynehastings | October 31, 2011 at 11:11 AM