A Beginners Introduction to Glasp: The Social media web highlighter

A Beginners Introduction to Glasp: The Social media web highlighter

This guide introduces Glasp, covers signup and installation steps, and how to create and share your first highlight and connect with other users.

Table of Content

  • What is Glasp?

  • Features of Glasp

  • Installing Glasp

    • Creating a Glasp account

    • Installing the Glasp browser extension

  • Using and exploring Glasp

    • Creating your first highlight

    • Creating a highlight from a video

    • Sharing your highlight

    • Exploring your homepage

    • Growing your community with Glasp

  • Why use Glasp?

  • Collective Learning and Networking at your Reach with Glasp

Most web users switch between web pages, finding bits and pieces of information and taking notes. However, the repetitive back-and-forth action involved can be inefficient. Glasp helps make this process proceed more smoothly and improves efficiency. It does this by enabling users to highlight, organize and save portions of text for later use. In addition, Glasp lets users access quotes from similar-minded individuals, which may improve their understanding.

This article provides a quick starting guide for Glasp and shows you how to create an account, create and share your first highlight, and connect with other members of the Glasp community.

What is Glasp?

Glasp, an acronym for 'Greatest Legacy Accumulated as Shared Proof', aims to improve individual and collective knowledge by removing the privacy induced by most note-taking applications. By highlighting and sharing content from web pages, individuals improve their workflow productivity and find and build a community with like-minded individuals while enhancing their knowledge of a subject.

Features of Glasp

Glasp aims to fulfil its objectives through these three core features:

  • Highlight: Glasp lets users capture online content through its numerous coloured highlighting options. Users scrolling through web content can grab important texts or quotes for further perusal instead of revisiting the same page several times.

  • Save and share: Users can save and share these highlighted content on their Glasp homepage, making them accessible to other users with similar topics.

  • Discover and connect with similar-minded individuals and content: Glasp promotes community-building via its highlighted content sharing. Individuals with similar highlighted content can discover themselves, grow their understanding of a particular subject area, and build new connections.

Installing Glasp

Glasp is a browser extension available for installation on Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Safari browsers

Creating a Glasp account

Before installing the Glasp extension, you need to create a Glasp account.

1. Navigate to Glasp on your browser. The home page looks like this.

Note: Your browser could be Chrome, Safari, Edge, or Brave, based on personal preferences. This short tutorial uses Chrome.

2. Click on Sign up(beta)

3. Complete the signup process via your Google account.

Installing the Glasp extension

Glasp is a browser extension available on browsers like Safari, Edge, and Chrome. Let's install the Glasp browser extension on Chrome.

1. Navigate to the Glasp Chrome extension download page.

2. Click Add to Chrome. This step installs the browser extension.

You can pin Glasp to your extensions tab by clicking on the extension menu and pinning it.

Using and Exploring Glasp

After signing up for Glasp, you can start using it by making your first highlight and sharing to connect with other users.

Creating your first Glasp Highlight

1. Navigate to a web page. This tutorial uses an API documentation learning page.

2. Let's highlight the definition of a REST API. You create a highlight by selecting the text portion and choosing a colour to use for the highlight. This screenshot example uses pink as the highlight colour.

Note: You can also add notes about your highlight and share.

3. Click on the pen icon to add a note to your highlight.

This icon opens a tab to the right to add a note.

Highlighting from a video

Glasp also lets you share highlights from videos on Youtube. Once you have the Glasp extension installed, you can create and share highlights from there too.

1. Open Youtube

2. Enter the name of the interested video. This tutorial uses the Python free beginners course from FreeCodeCamp.

  • Your Glasp extension manager for Youtube shows on the right side of the screen.

  • You can generate an AL summary of the course by clicking the openai button.

3. Click on the toggle button. This button displays the transcript from your current video.

4. Select some text to create your highlight.

5. Navigate to the highlight section on your homepage.

  • Your video highlight is now available in the video section.

Sharing your Highlights

There are multiple ways to share your highlight. For example, you can share to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn or copy the link to share to other platforms.

Let's share our most recent highlight.

1. Click on the share icon.

2. Choose the platform you want to share the highlight to.

3. Clicking on the Twitter icon takes you to your Twitter homepage to tweet your highlight.

4. Click on the LinkedIn icon to share on LinkedIn. Here, it makes a LinkedIn post and prompts you to share as a post or send it as a message.

Exploring your homepage

Let's further explore Glasp and its features.

1. Go to your Glasp homepage.

Your Glasp homepage contains the following sections:

a. The left section contains your selected and recommended topics, and some follow suggestions to grow your community.

b. The mid-section lets you navigate between popular topics and highlights from those you follow.

c. The right section shows individuals who highlighted the article with the selected highlight.

2. You can also use the top navigation bar to see your highlights and explore highlights from other topics.

3. Navigate to My Highlights to view your highlights. The screenshot below shows the highlight we created in the previous section.

4. Click on Explore to explore highlights from other topics or via authors.

5. Invite friends to start using Glasp by using the share icon.

You can copy and share the invite code to social media or share directly by clicking on the social media icons to share to the platform.

6. You can curate your Glasp homepage by clicking on the ellipsis icon(...) to help select from the broad range of topics offered by Glasp.

You can select up to ten different topics of interest.

Growing your community with Glasp

Growing your learning community with Glasp is easy and achievable through the following ways:

1. Click on the ellipsis icon beside the Who to Follow copy.

This icon brings up a list of suggested Glaspers that have similar interests as you.

Now you can follow as many users as you want.

2. A second way to connect is to find other users who liked highlights from your interested topics.

a. This shows a highlight from one of your interested topics (product management).

b. This arrow shows us fellow users who highlighted the article.

c. Moving your cursor over a user displays a pop-up profile page that lets you follow the Glasp user.

Why use Glasp?

  • Networking and community growth: For professionals looking to network with other professionals and establish thought leadership on a subject or topic, sharing highlights and notes from their topics of interest helps them connect with similar topics, grow their learning about the subject matter, and connect with other like-minded individuals.

  • Effective research and writing: For writers who depend on intensive research and source credibility for their articles, Glasp improves their workflow. Using coloured highlights, researchers and writers can highlight and group quotes or article sections for later use when writing their final article. Additionally, sharing these highlights on their Glasp homepage increases the article's credibility and authoritative value.

  • Improved workflow: Taking notes between learning and research usually involves jumping between multiple apps, which becomes tiring. Glasp improves the efficiency of this process by letting users highlight on the webpage, and organize and share the web highlight, making it easily accessible and available for export into tools like Notion. There's also the increased benefit of finding additional resources related to your highlight.

  • Collective learning: For individuals learning about a subject matter, sharing an article quote or highlight on their homepage exposes them to similar highlights and quotes about the same subject, improving their knowledge and understanding of the topic.

Collective Learning and Networking at your reach with Glasp

Incorporating Glasp into your daily workflow can help you work better and faster and improve your learning process. Glasp makes note-taking more efficient by curating and organizing your highlights without having to navigate between multiple tabs. Additionally, your homepage contains web page highlights specially curated to your interests, enabling you to grow and add to your learning resources while boosting networking opportunities to grow your network. You can start using Glasp by installing the extension to create and share your highlights and grow your community.