Got the following email from ReadSocial’s co-founder, Travis Alber (who is also the founder of BookGlutton):
… I wanted to drop you a note that we’ve officially launched ReadSocial (we’ve been working with a few testing partners for some time, but now we’re officially “launched”). We’re glad to give you a live demo next time you’re in the city.
Overview: ReadSocial allows publishers to overlay social features (groups, paragraph-level comments) on top of web content and inside iPad apps.
Site (and live demo video on the video page) – http://www.readsocial.net
We think it will level the playing field for social reading – this allows publishers to save a few hundred hours developing these features (including a scalable backend system and front-end interface); they can effectively have their programmer implement
ReadSocial in an hour. It also gets rid of reading silos – it works between the web and apps seamlessly. Glad to hop on the phone if you’d like to know more.Best,
Travis
ReadSocial is a service that adds social features to your content quickly and easily. By grabbing a few lines of code and dropping it into your iPad app or website, you can offer groups and shared comments, right on top of your content, no matter where it is.
Here’s an example: If one person is reading your content in your iPad app and another person is reading it on the Web, you can make a bridge between the two and spark conversation. Comments travel between systems, despite DRM, and you can import comments made by other users.
And — did we mention? — comments can be text, links or images. We offer two open-source clients — feel free to alter and improve them! We want you to focus on your content, not setting up servers, scaling databases and designing social user interfaces!
From the press release:
ReadSocial, a service that makes social reading easy to integrate for
websites and apps, has launched. Beginning today, publishers and
content owners can integrate a few lines of code to create groups and
paragraph level discussions.“We wanted to level the playing field” says founder Travis Alber.
“Conversations are more valuable in context, especially at the
paragraph level, but most companies don’t have the resources to spend
a few hundred hours developing and maintaining a solution. We’re
giving them an easy way to add extra value to what they’re already
publishing.”Since ReadSocial is integrated at the website or app level, the user
doesn’t need to do anything to install it: highlighting text reveals
the social features. From that highlighted text, users can leave a
comment in a selected group, or create new groups for their comments.
Group names are hashtags, like #biology, #ows, or #bobsenglishclass,
and act as overlays on the content. Switching overlays is as easy as
changing the hashtag. The comments themselves can be text, images, or
links.With ReadSocial, there are a number of ways to enhance content.
Authors can attach comments, organizations can create groups around
sponsored content, and schools can create groups based on classes.
Contributors can create glosses for works by layering on links, photos
and side notes, and grouping them with hashtags.To get started, publishers register with the ReadSocial service at
ReadSocial.net, and download either a web-based, open source client
library, or an iPad code-library (coming later this March as part of a
partnership with Float Mobile Learning). Integrating the code is fast
and easy, and publishers have a dashboard where they can get usage
metrics and manage annotation content.Alber adds “Many partners will use the ReadSocial service to get
social features up and running, which is our goal. But the real power
behind ReadSocial is how portable it is. ReadSocial gets rid of the
silos. If two users are reading the content in different environments
(one is on the web, and the other is inside an app), a comment
attached via the web shows up in the iPad app. That’s what’s most
exciting to us – that it just works, like people expect it to.”
