Sometimes the internet feels like a desk
covered in paper, piled high with doodled napkins, chicken-scratch
post-its and stacks of bank statements. At best, sorting through the
mess of content will lead you to spend a few moments appreciating what
you’ve found, but more likely, you’ll make a mental note and file it
away in your digital manila folder—for future reference!— before it’s
lost among the other 10,000 things you swore you were going to get back
to. You know what would be handy? A highlighter. One of those basic neon markers that tells you, with little room for ambiguity, This Matters. Pith.li, an almost-launched service, thinks it can be the yellow marker for your digital toolbox. “We want to be your knowledge management system,” Lev Detrez, one of the Antwerp startup’s four co-founders tells me.
The startup’s pitch is simple: Paste any website URL into Pith.li’s website and it’ll strip the content into a clean version that you can mark all over like a piece of paper. Your cursor acts as your marker, allowing you to highlight bits of text and make notes in the margins while saving your highlights in a tidy little box on the left side of your screen. The idea is that over time you’ll be able to build an easily accessible file of the most interesting stuff on the internet and be able to share just share those bits with whoever you want.
Pith.li isn’t the first company to offer a tool for highlighting and annotating the web. There’s Evernote and Genius and soon Internet Explorer will come with a highlighting tool bundled into its browser. You can “screenshort” text and post it to Twitter if you please. Pith.li is, however, the most simple tool I’ve used yet.
There’s not a whole lot to Pith.li, which I write as a compliment more than anything. It’s not weighted down by extra features—it’s quite literally just a digital highlighter (for proof: you don’t even need to sign up for an account to use it). “We rather make a product that is used to its full potential by 90% of it’s users, that to add a lot of extra bells and whistles to become a product that is only used for 50% of its potential,” says Detrez.
Pith.li’s success is going to be dependent on how easy it makes organizing and storing the information we highlight. The founders say that unread highlights will auto delete after a pre-determined amount of lapsed time to avoid the infinite tab syndrome we’re all too familiar. And naturally, Pith.li has eventual plans to create channels around topics, so if you’d like to see highlighted content around politics or technology you’ll be able to curate your network to reflect that. “We’ll be your collective online memory,” Johanes Van Hove, another founder says.
That’s great! My memory sucks, so I’ll take the help. Less interesting to me is Pith.li’s intangible, long-term goal as a platform and more the fact that there’s finally a super simple way to cut through the bullshit on the internet. And it’s a highlighter that we can’t lose, no less.