Why I started Reading
I work at a great startup named Svpply - I love it - and I built a tool named Reading to help us talk better together. Here’s what Reading looks like on the web:
And here’s what it looks like the way we use it at Svpply, with HipChat integration:
Reading’s bookmarklet lets you post the current page in your browser to your reading list, a list that other users can follow. You’re encouraged to post before you start reading the page - before you’ve decided whether or not you like the content - so that others can join in while you’re still there, taking it all in.
I started Reading because we, here at Svpply, kept asking each other “did you see <insert webpage here>?”, which is a funny question for a bunch of people who spend all day together. I knew what Marisa ate for lunch (I watched her eat it) but I didn’t know about any of the sites she visited, especially the ones that were mentioning Svpply. So I hooked into the HipChat API and built a small bookmarklet to easily broadcast what you’re reading. Here’s how it began:
The application didn’t do much more than write a cookie, storing the user’s name and the HipChat room they’d like to post to. If you’re not familiar with HipChat, it’s a wonderful group chat tool that we use extensively at Svpply and our “Reading Room” quickly turned into a realtime feed of our posts.
The next iteration added a database for storing posts and a link wrapper to automatically post to your reading list when clicking another user’s link; www.arts-crafts.ca/constantines became reading.am/www.arts-crafts.ca/constantines and everything got a bit easier. It also allowed us to see who was clicking on whose links, like so:
It’s fun to see who’s clicking your links.
Reading works for us because it’s not about curation. We all have our own blogs and Twitter accounts and those are great for sharing a select link every now and again, but we tend to use them to communicate things we’ve already digested. Reading, instead, is about the stuff we’re ingesting, the things in-between, the stream of content that gets our wheels turning throughout the day.
And it works for us because it’s a realtime feed - it’s very easy to see the cause and effect of a string of reading posts as they stream in. The web interface currently requires manual refreshing (a long polling stream is high on my todo list) but you can get the realtime experience today by plugging into our HipChat, Campfire (yep, that’s new!), or push API support. Find them under your settings page within Reading.
Reading has shifted our conversation at Svpply - it’s been fun - and I enjoy working on it here and there because each time I do, the conversation gets even better. Maybe you’ll get a kick out of it too.
Try it here: http://reading.am
Follow it here: @reading
