Your virtual nook for the new era of digital media 🤩📖 WebShelf aims to link communities together one annotation at a time. Social first, smooth as Twitter, and seamlessly integrated into knowledge management tools. WebShelf is your personal file system for web content with the functionality of modern social media. With convenient webpage highlights and annotations, communal features such as public-facing libraries, a personalized feed (likes, comments, shares), and an ML ConnectBot that uses your historical preferences to automatically spark relevant conversations between users, our platform will usher in a new medium for connectivity.
Our information diets are incredibly fragmented- from articles we don't make time for, to viral tweetstorms, to our daily podcasts, blog posts, and more. Book and article recommendations are strewn across texts, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, email inboxes, and countless other channels. Furthermore, we're constantly inundated with content from every angle imaginable, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Media is meant to make us think and be social; why don't we have a platform for consolidating and sharing with others what we're consuming?
This problem is both blatantly obvious and incredibly important to solve. I noticed it and decided it was worth working on for me after observing a few trends:
- When a friend and I would talk about a certain subject, there might be a flurry of links sent back and forth on articles/readings/background on the topic. Unfortunately, most of these links are lost in the black hole of message history, and are seldom read or discussed, despite our desire to do so.
- Recommendations for books, articles, podcasts, movies, TV, and more are infinitely more valuable when they come from people we trust.
- Sharing our knowledge and insights is an infinite game that only serves to augment and refine our collective understanding. Many requests for advice, especially in professional or vocational settings often result in media recommendations (think books to read, videos to watch, etc).
- Nearly every 'successful' or highly visible person has reading recommendations on a blog or somewhere else, but they're hopelessly strewn around the web. Open-sourcing these recommendations can help people understand the way others see the world.
- No one has capitalized on this (Pocket, Readwise, Goodreads, etc) as a social-first opportunity yet. With Notion/Roam APIs becoming fully baked soon, now's the time to build!
Webshelf is a digital bookshelf of sorts. Inherently social while still being a valuable tool for personal use.