Hey, I’m Dave, the founder of Kontxt.io (https://www.kontxt.io). Engage directly on the web and save, organize, and share highlights and notes. Follow people. Join groups. And search content. Here’s a 2-minute demo (https://youtu.be/Th4vaOzuGnU). It works on desktop and mobile. The web layer is like Google-Doc collaboration on the entire web, and it’s connected to a web app that’s like a combo of DropBox to save and organize your findings, and Twitter/Reddit to share and discover bite-sized article highlights with other people.
1.) The Social Web Layer has rich collaboration features with privacy and share controls: Inline highlights, tags, polls, comments, @mentions, deep-links to anything you add to the page, and navigation between parts. The web layer can be added to any site or PDF with a single line of javascript. This is done with a browser extension, bookmarklet, or added to a page directly by the site owner with the word-press plugin or hard-coded javascript.
2.) The CMS and Social Network lets you organize with folders that have privacy and share controls, a profile with your public highlights, a feed of highlights from people you follow, groups with feeds around topics, and the ability to search your content and what others share publicly.
For years, I had a long commute, so I read online a lot–from HN, of course. There’s too much to read everything, and you only know if an article is “worth-it” after you read it. Then it hit me. Highlights! 1.) On the page with navigation, 2.) visible before you open the link, and 3.) to increase quality and relevance, follow and search highlights by trusted people like friends, co-workers, university peers, and industry leaders.
There’s too much information and not enough time. Highlights are short, useful, and fast to read. Kontxt.io lets you direct attention to what matters. First, it lets you find quality sources from trusted people, then it lets you focus on the important parts of them. Kontxt basically turns the web into an interactive workspace so you can have rich web interactions with other Kontxt users. Or you can extract highlights into a shareable link and post it anywhere on the web–with analytics for what you share. Highlights are automatically saved to the CMS and based on their privacy settings, may be published to feeds in the social network for others to see. Naturally, you may want to discuss the same site with different people for disparate reasons, so you can create multiple highlight layers on a single site, each with Google-Doc-like sharing, privacy, and authorization controls.
It’s now evolved into a general communication and engagement platform for the web. Here’s how Kontxt has been used or where people expressed interest: social news aggregator, productivity, research & planning (generally, and specifically for sales, law, & finance), knowledge-base, training & education, publisher inline-engagement system, etc.
Kontxt gets to the point fast. It brings collaboration directly to the web itself and is already part of your natural workflow since it's always with you every click of the way. The social network is unique since it uses highlights to seed discussions. This has many benefits. Highlights mean people have actually read the article, the source is cited, and parts can’t be misconstrued because you have context. It’s also a human filter of the internet. A site is likely worthwhile if someone took the time to highlight it, and if someone found it useful, then someone “like” them probably will, too. Similarly, if someone’s not willing to highlight a site before they send it to you, it’s probably not worth your time. And highlights will increase how many people actually read what you send them because they’re short, useful, and fast to read.
I’m excited to share this with all of you. Thanks for your time. Please leave any feedback or questions in the comments. If you try it out, be sure to join the “Hacker News” group.
First impression harsh feedback: It takes too many seconds between opening your landing page and understanding what your product is. The first thing I should see is your product doing something I want. By the time I scrolled to the cute icons with aspirational text, I did not understand what it is. To actually see what any of the product looks like, I have to click a video and watch about 15 seconds of contentless title screens.
Hi, this looks a lot like this project:
https://github.com/DanilaFe/matrix-highlight
It that leverages the multiple possibilities of open standards like Matrix to make a really cool to highlight web page contents and fostering discutions, all from any server you want :D
Also another project, cited in the README of matrix-highlight:
Ambitious! Cool idea, but its scope is so broad... I think your roadmap will need to include robust support for integration with related tools. For example, it's hard to imagine committing to creating highlights in an all-in-one service like this, vs something like Readwise, which lets me export highlights to my Obsidian vault.
I love everything about this idea. If any of you remember mybloglog which was acquired by yahoo back in the day, they had all the ingredients that were missing from the web back when the cool kids were calling in web2.0. I met and interacted with so many blog writers who were able to see me land on their website and followed my profile back to mine, opening up a whole new social experience for those who created on the web. I hope this service moves in that direction over time, providing an escape from the walled Gardens of social media today and bringing it back to the open web where it belongs. Why Google or others haven't decided to ship a similar service right in Chrome is beyond me .. instead of a me too offering that was Google Plus.. the open web itself is where those social interactions and connections to me make most sense.
Pretty cool, interested to see where you take this. Have you checked out Hypothesis? It's a similar tool thats been around for a long time: https://web.hypothes.is/
Hey David, congrats on the launch. Really happy to see the product here and all the best with the venture. David has been working hard on this for quite some time and regularly reaching out to different audiences in different mediums to collect feedback and work on product. I was part of the early test and I did really like the idea. It is quite comprehensive, for people organizing stuff in a workflow this will be a new change.
Some feedback:
- Teal & pink text look bad on white, it would pop out in dark theme.
- "All Browsers & Devices
Bookmark a̶ ̶r̶a̶n̶d̶o̶m̶ this site."My response is the same as any other third party commenting system. If you want to show annotations or comments directly layered on my website, forget about it. Or maybe pay me. Twitter, Facebook, et al, don't show this layered on my site but separately, on their own site.
What are your plans for dealing with people who do not wish to have a third-party commenting layer they have no moderation power in forced upon them, and for the problem of a “let’s find weird people and mock them until they are on the verge of suicide” community like LJDrama/Something Awful/4Chan/Kiwifarms/etc starting to use Kontxt?
This is a problem that every “we made a comments layer for the entire web!” project has faced.