Why I created Favorize
There’s an overload of online content — we all know that. With all the noise, it’s hard to identify the good knowledge sources from the mediocre or bad ones, leading you to spend a lot of time figuring out what to read, skim or skip. Data shows our attention span is down to eight seconds, and we simply don’t have the time or desire to read full articles. People want the meat, as fast as possible! That’s why I created Favorize.
So what’s Favorize?
Think of Favorize similar to Instagram, but with paragraphs instead of photos or videos. The feed is a collection of text-only excerpts from online articles, highlighted and tagged by people (not algorithms). Favorize was created to make the most of the internet and your time. It’s a tool to highlight, share and discover knowledge.
The back story
Since I was little, my dad has introduced me to the best knowledge sources, having grown up a bookworm himself. My dad reads more than anyone I know; he reads for hours every day and has been doing so for more than 40 years. I remember his pre-internet reading process too— he always used two pens to highlight books and articles. One to highlight, while the other served as a ruler, and he was damn precise with it.
During the mid to late 90s, my dad morphed into an internetworm. He established his new internet reading technique early on and hasn’t evolved it much since: copying an article into Outlook, annotating it in multiple colors and then emailing it to several lists including coworkers, family and friends.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear from many of these people (often unsolicited) that they genuinely love the articles he sends, though not too surprised, since I also appreciate them. Nonetheless, I was surprised because of the volume — he sends an average of 10 emails a day, which can be hard to keep up with. In his mind, he’s making it easy for others by highlighting them. But because his annotations are in every color of the rainbow, have no legend, and the formatting gets messed up from copying and pasting, that’s typically not the case (sorry, dad!).
Here’s an example of one of his emails:
Aside from the horrible formatting, I value what I’ve learned online and from his daily articles, more than any school or program I’ve participated in. Of course there are valuable, irreplaceable lessons to learn from face to face interactions, but spending just ten minutes browsing all of the subjects my dad has already identified as worthwhile is almost always more effective than ten minutes with just one person.
Favorize was created to make my dad’s knowledge sharing process a better experience. It was created to solve my itch to learn as much as possible in the most efficient way, so I can constantly work toward becoming a smarter, better person. We have enough social networks at our fingertips, but not enough truly efficient resources to gain knowledge. My goal is for Favorize to be that resource.
How does it work?
Favorize makes it easy to highlight and share content:
Each user receives his or her own personalized feed. This experience makes it simple to discover new content, highlighted by people you know and whose opinions you trust:
You can also access content highlighted by Favorizers outside your following, and use filters to index results:
Favorize is available for Chrome and our website is responsive, so you can view and interact with the feed on your phone until we release native mobile apps. Hit us up with your thoughts, requests and feedback at @FavorizeApp or say hello to Fabio, the Favorize octopus, at hello@favorize.com
Thanks for stopping by!
