Sparking the Public Conversation
The Highly Team is Joining Twitter
January 2020 Update
Highly is now closed and offline. Thanks for lighting up the web with us. Our data export period has ended, so highlight collections are no longer accessible.
April 17, 2019
The Gist, the TLDR, the BLUF, the Minto: the Highly team is joining Twitter to help serve the public conversation. Your highlights are safe and sound in your collection. Highly apps are now free, and a few will be discontinued. We can’t comment on future plans.
For information on product changes, skip to the bottom.
We highlight to share. We share to spark conversation.
Grandma highlights to share. We all do.
I posted that anecdote when we introduced Highly, a few years back, and since then, I think we’ve made Grandma proud. If you’ve been following our project, then you already know that Highly’s job isn’t simply making highlights. (We do that, and darn well.) Highly’s job is making highlights useful.
Social highlights can make sharing stories online feel personal, efficient and alive — like retelling a story to a friend, over coffee. They give people shared context and spark meaningful conversations.
Highly exists to enable awesome convos, and we’re looking forward to bringing our Highly-informed perspective to Twitter’s work serving the public conversation.
If you’ve not been following our project, no worries. Here’s what we’ve been up to.
The Highlight Layer
Highly Highlighter — our single-player tool—puts a magical marker in peoples’ hands, combining powerful privacy controls and inventive interfaces into a fast, fluid internet highlighter that works darn near everywhere. Apple and Google have recognized the app, and Highly members have marked millions of highlights with it. Why? Sharing.
Highlighting is the most personal, efficient way to pass along a story.
Highly’s sharing tools — its multiplayer mode — are the essence of the app, enabling folks to spark convos on social networks, Slack, iMessage, and more. And these layers of shared, public highlights unlock new ways to discover and consume stories, too.
Highlights, not headlines, lede the modern newspaper. Highly packages public highlights into Social Summaries — its networked Heatmap mode. We juice the gist from any story and deliver a Goldilocksian just-right format: much more informative than the headline, and much faster than reading the full story. It’s rich with social context, transparently produced and participatory.
The Public Conversation
Sharing highlights, not headlines — sharing thinking instead of lazily linking — helps spark the kind of conversation that leaves participants and observers alike a bit better off than they started. We’d like to see more of this.
Twitter hosts today’s most meaningful public conversations, full stop.
We’re bringing our Highly-inspired perspective to Twitter’s work serving the public conversation. It’s a colossal, critical project, and we’re eager to chip in.
Thank You So Dang Much
We’d be nowhere without our Happy Highlighters — the thoughtful community for (and with) whom we’ve built Highly. Your feedback guides us, and your enthusiasm drives us. Thank you.
We’d be just Sharpies and spreadsheets without the talents and trust of the teammates, investors and advisors who bet their time and money on this project. Thank you. Super Hi-Fives to Roy and the Bloomberg Beta crew, Raanan and the Resolute community, and Ev.
Eric and I are humbled by your belief and support.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes to Highly Products
Your highlight collection is safe and sound.
Heretofore paid products Crowd Control and Highly for Teams are now free. Existing subscribers won’t be charged again and don’t need to take any action.
Highly for iOS and Highly for Slack will be discontinued Friday, April 26. No highlights will be harmed.
If we make more changes to the service, we’ll continue communicating with all members via email.
Contact
press@twitter.com (general inquiries)
heyo@highly.co (product questions)
About Highly
Highly is the internet’s highlight layer. Highlight darn near anything, share the meaty parts instead of timesucking links, see your peoples’ highlights as you surf the web, and start the day with your Highly newspaper.
