Glasp — A Free Social-Based Web Highlighter
Share your knowledge with the world, and learn from others
I just discovered Glasp, an app where you can share the ideas you find on the web, and learn from others. Basically, it’s like a social network where you share highlights and ideas instead of sharing your latest picture on the beach.
I really like the concept, so I thought it might be worth talking about it. Also, you can export your highlights to Obsidian, and those of you who follow me know that I need integration with Obsidian for this kind of app. Moreover, Glasp is totally free.
What is Glasp?
As I said, Glasp is a social network. You can follow people, and therefore also have subscribers. What’s interesting is that you publish web highlights, which actually is useful content.
Let’s say I find a quote that interests me in an article I’m reading on Medium. With Glasp, I can add it to my highlights, in which case it’s published on my feed, and my subscribers can see it.
Here’s what Glasp looks like:
As you can see, it’s really like a social network, with people you can follow, suggested topics, etc., but geared towards learning.
Why Use Glasp?
Already, the main reason for using Glasp is that it allows knowledge to be shared, rather than kept to oneself. This is the vision of the creators and their motivation:
The problem we are addressing is the isolation of knowledge. If you leave your knowledge, insights, experiences only in personal spaces (e.g. note-taking apps), no one can access them after you die. You might be able to publish your notes just before you die but no one knows when it is. Since collective learning is how humans got smarter across generations, it would be a huge loss for all if we can’t access what you have learned throughout your life.
I agree, why keep knowledge to yourself if it doesn’t cost anything to share it?
So, Glasp lets you find people with the same interests as you, and therefore potentially find things in their feed that you don’t know about and that could be useful to you.
On top of this, Glasp offers the basic functionality of a highlights manager. It lets you organize your highlights, add notes, tags, etc. to them.
Glasp also has some nice features like the ability to choose highlights and see how they connect to each other via AI, or to ask your digital self something and get an AI-generated response using your highlights, and more.
Getting Started with Glasp
If you’d like to try out Glasp, start by creating an account on their website.
You can then install the Glasp Chrome extension, which lets you highlight web pages and store these highlights on your profile.
And that’s it! Now you can highlight any page and those highlights will be published on your profile!
Glasp Features
Heatmap
The heatmap gives you an overview of the number of highlights you’ve added each day. In addition, if you click on a day, you can access the highlights added that day.
Tags
Tags are a simple way of organizing your highlights and finding them quickly. They also appear in an atomic graph, which is a simple visual representation of your tags. You can click on any node to access the corresponding highlights.
Explore
The “Explore” tab allows you to find resources related to a specific topic. Then, inside these pages, you can find all the highlights and comments of people that have highlighted them.
My Highlights
This tab allows you to see your highlights and more. You can see your favorites articles, the articles you’ve saved from others, your Kindle highlights if you have some, your video highlights…
You can also export your highlights to a file. You have many formats available. For example, you can export your highlights to Markdown in order to use them within Obsidian.
Highlighting Videos
Thanks to the Glasp Chrome extension, you can highlight videos. Indeed, the extension generates a transcript where you can just highlight text as you would do for an article.
You can also click on the OpenAI logo and it will open ChatGPT to generate a summary of the video.
Other Features
There are some other features you can discover by yourself, and others I just can’t try because I don’t have enough highlights, in particular, AI-related functions (such as asking your virtual you something and finding links between highlights).
Final Note
Glasp is still in beta, but it looks very promising. It seems to have all the features I’m looking for in a web highlighter, with some extra features, and above all the opportunity to share your highlights and learn from others.
I’m going to keep trying it out over the next few weeks, so I can finally decide whether to integrate it into my workflow. If you’d like to give Glasp a try, click here. And if you want to follow me, check my profile.
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