Social Reading User Interface for Discovery

I read quite a bit of material online. I save “bookmarks” of all of it on my personal website, sometimes with some additional notes and sometimes even with more explicit annotations. One of the things I feel like I’m missing from my browser, browser extensions, and/or social feed reader is a social layer overlay that could indicate that people in my social network(s) have read or interacted directly with that page (presuming they make that data openly available.)

One of the things I’d love to see pop up out of the discovery explorations of the IndieWeb or some of the social readers in the space is the ability to uncover some of this social reading information. Toward this end I thought I’d collect some user interface examples of things that border on this sort of data to make the brainstorming and building of such functionality easier in the near future.

If I’m missing useful examples or you’d like to add additional thoughts, please feel free to comment below.

Examples of social reading user interface for discovery

Google

I don’t often search for reading material directly, but Google has a related bit of UI indicating that I’ve visited a website before. I sort of wish it had the ability to surface the fact that I’ve previously read or bookmarked an article or provided data about people in my social network who’ve done similarly within the browser interface for a particular article (without the search.) If a browser could use data from my personal website in the background to indicate that I’ve interacted with it before (and provide those links, notes, etc.), that would be awesome!

Screen capture for Google search of Kevin Marks with a highlight indicating that I've visited this page in the recent past
Screen capture for Google search of Kevin Marks with a highlight indicating that I’ve visited his page several times in the past. Given the March 2017 date, it’s obvious that the screen shot is from a browser and account I don’t use often.

I’ll note here that because of the way I bookmark or post reads on my own website, my site often ranks reasonably well for those things.

On a search for an article by Aaron Parecki, my own post indicating that I’ve read it in the past ranks second right under the original.

In some cases, others who are posting about those things (reading, commenting, bookmarking, liking, etc.) in my social network also show up in these sorts of searches. How cool would it be to have a social reader that could display this sort of social data based on people it knows I’m following? 

A search for a great article by Matthias Ott shows that both I and several of my friends (indicated by red arrows superimposed on the search query) have read, bookmarked, or commented on it too.

Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is is a great open source highlighting, annotation, and bookmarking tool with a browser extension that shows an indicator of how many annotations  appear on the page. In my experience, higher numbers often indicate some interesting and engaging material. I do wish that it had a follower/following model that could indicate my social sphere has annotated a page. I also wouldn’t mind if their extension “bug” in the browser bar had another indicator in the other corner to indicate that I had previously annotated a page!

Screen capture of Vannevar Bush’s article As We May Think in The Atlantic with a Hypothes.is browser extension bug indicating that there are 329 annotations on the page.

Reading.am

It doesn’t do it until after-the-fact, but Reading.am has a pop up overlay through its browser extension. It adds me to the list of people who’ve read an article, but it also indicates others in the network and those I’m following who have also read it (sometimes along with annotations about their thoughts).

What I wouldn’t give to see that pop up in the corner before I’ve read it!

Reading.am’s social layer creates a yellow colored pop up list in the upper right of the browser indicating who else has read the article as well as showing some of their notes on it. Unfortunately it doesn’t pop up until after you’ve marked the item as read.

Nuzzel

Nuzzel is one of my favorite tools. I input my Twitter account as well as some custom lists and it surfaces articles that people in my Twitter network have been tweeting about. As a result, it’s one of the best discovery tools out there for solid longer form content. Rarely do I read content coming out of Nuzzel and feel robbed. Because of how it works, it’s automatically showing those people in my network and some of what they’ve thought about it. I love this contextualization.

Nuzzel’s interface shows the title and an excerpt of an article and also includes the avatars, names, network, and commentary of one’s friends that interacted with the piece. In this example it’s relatively obvious that one reader influenced several others who retweeted it because of her.

Goodreads

Naturally sites for much longer form content will use social network data about interest, reviews, and interaction to a much greater extent since there is a larger investment of time involved. Thus social signaling can be more valuable in this context. A great example here is of Goodreads which shows me those in my network who are interested in reading a particular book or who have written reviews or given ratings.

A slightly excerpted/modified screen capture of the Goodreads page for Melanie Mitchell’s book Complexity that indicates several in my social network are also interested in reading it.

Are there other examples I’m missing? Are you aware of similar discovery related tools for reading that leverage social network data?

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

10 thoughts on “Social Reading User Interface for Discovery”

  4. Have you ever checked out Diigo? It’s basically a classic social bookmarking site “on steroids”. Including a browser plugin that allows for highlighting, searching your bookmarks while googling and full caching of sites.

    Reply

    1. Thanks Nils! Yes, I’ve been been using Diigo–apparently since 2 June 2015. I’ll agree it is very nice, but, like most social sites, I don’t expect it to be around forever or to really safeguard my data. Thus, in IndieWeb POSSE or PESOS fashion, I tend to keep my bookmarks and annotations (as well as other social data) on my own website and syndicate them out to other services like Diigo. I often back up/cache site data to my own site’s back end and frequently also regularly archive it to the Internet Archive as it’s posted.

      While there are a few social features in Diigo including RSS feeds, I do wish they allowed following/followers so that I could more easily subscribe to other’s content in a simpler fashion. I suppose I’m content enough to follow people or topics/tags (example: edtech) in my lowly feed reader.

      Reply

      1. I should also note that Diigo also has a Chrome extension that has a colored indicator with a red bookmark once one has bookmarked an article. This means that when revisiting it, one will have a visual indicator within the browser of having visited that page and bookmarked it before.

        Reply

  7. You had me at “select text”…

    If somebody else selects some text, it’ll be highlighted for you. ❧

    Suddenly social annotation has taken an interesting twist. @Hypothes_is better watch out! 😉
    Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:03AM

    How often have you been on the phone with a friend, trying to describe how to get somewhere online? Okay go to Amazon. Okay type in “whatever”. Okay, it’s the third one down for me…
    This is ridiculous!
    What if, instead, you both went to the website and then you could just say: follow me. ❧

    There are definitely some great use cases for this.
    Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:05AM

    A status emoji will appear in the top right corner of your browser. If it’s smiling, there are other people on the site right now too. ❧

    This is pretty cool looking. I’ll have to add it as an example to my list: Social Reading User Interface for Discovery.
    We definitely need more things like this on the web.
    It makes me wish the Reading.am indicator were there without needing to click on it.
    I wonder how this sort of activity might be built into social readers as well?
    Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:13AM

    If I’m in a meeting, I should be able to share a link in the chat to a particular post on my blog, then select the paragraph I’m talking about and have it highlighted for everyone. Well, now I can. ❧

    And you could go a few feet farther if you added fragment support to the site, then the browser would also autoscroll to that part. Then you could add a confetti cannon to the system and have the page rain down confetti when more than three people have highlighted the same section!
    Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:18AM

    I want the patina of fingerprints, the quiet and comfortable background hum of a library. ❧

    A great thing to want on a website! A tiny hint of phatic interaction amongst internet denizens.
    Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:20AM

    What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS). ❧

    I love the idea of social peripheral vision online.
    Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:22AM

    streak: New posts for 52 consecutive weeks. ❧

    It’s kind of cool that he’s got a streak counter for his posts.
    Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:24AM

    Syndicated copies:

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