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Thursday, May 06, 2010

Kindle Popular Highlights Now Shared Online and on Facebook and Twitter

Amazon Kindle Popular Highlights takes reading social:
Amazon has starting rolling out its latest 2.5 Kindle update and with it a new feature called Popular Highlights.

What some will either class as incredibly annoying or the future of reading, users will now be able to see where other people have highlighted text within a book, very much like reading a used text book.
For me, this is very interesting because I can now go to a web page and see which passages in my book, Get Seen, are most popular.

Amazon kindle Highlights - Get Seen
Most popular highlights from Get Seen, Search Results Page

You can visit the highlighted results page and look around yourself.

My friend Len Edgerly is reading Get Seen on his Kindle and he's turned on the twitter interface, so the quote he likes get's posted to the kindle popular highlights page, and it gets posted to his twitter feed.

Amazon Kindle Highlights Tweet
Twitter post

Here's the link to the individual highlight in Len's tweet.

Note:
Len also shared the link on his Facebook Wall.

One problem with the current implementation is that on the kindle popular highlights page, the permalink of each post is not displayed, so there's no way for the reader to share that link, unless they happen to see it on the reader's twitter feed, if they've enabled twitter sharing.

This will be an easy fix for amazon.

What do you think about social sharing what you read?