Day 3 of #productidea — Bringing the experience of reading Medium to the whole web

This is part of my #productidea 30 day challenge on which each day I write about a new product idea.

Medium is building a great platform for readers and writers. One of the things that I like most is highlighting phrases that I want to remember later. And at the same time, discovering articles from people I follow who have highlighted a phrase. I miss doing the same on articles on other platforms.

The idea is to build a Chrome Extension that does the following on any website:

• It allows you to highlight phrases you like.
• It shows you top highlighted phrases within the article.
• It allows you to reply to the article (there are many websites without comments).
• It shows you replies to the article.
• And of course, it will allow you to enable reader mode to just show the article without any other distractions.

All that info would be shown on your own profile where users could read your highlighted phrases all over the web and your replies to articles. On that same platform you could see articles the people you follow are recommending, their highlights and replies.

This is in fact, an idea I may do soon as a side project.

Update: Álvaro Ortiz has brought into my attention two project that are somehow similar (Annotateit and Genius). They aren’t exactly what I have in mind, but are pretty similar. Not sure if I’d use them though because of that different twist and UI.