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November 2020: Four Months of Notado

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November 2020: Four Months of Notado

Third Party Integrations, Mobile Apps, Imports, Bots, and more

Notado
Nov 11, 2020
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November 2020: Four Months of Notado

notado.substack.com

It has been four months since Notado, a content-first bookmarking service, was first shared publicly on Hacker News, and a lot has changed since then! Notado has grown to host thousands of notes from hundreds of users across the world in many different languages, and this growing user base has inspired new ideas and functionality that have been integrated into Notado over the Summer and Autumn months.

This post will present a short overview of how Notado has evolved since July.

Wait, What is Content-First Bookmarking Again?

Content-first bookmarking is the idea that when bookmarking the web, the primary focus should be on the content. Today’s bookmarking ecosystem is still largely centred around articles and webpages, with the link being the primary focus of the bookmark and quotes or highlights being a secondary or tertiary focus that are stored as optional metadata.

A content-first approach opens the path to bookmarking and organising commentary and user discussion alongside traditionally published web content.

July

Syncing to Readwise

Notado originally launched with support for syncing saved notes automatically to Instapaper and Pinboard, but soon after launch it became clear that the most desired integration was Readwise. The Readwise team reached out to offer early access to their public API and before long Notado was also offering support to automatically sync saved notes to Readwise.

Today, Readwise is the most popular third party integration configured by Notado users.

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Notado @notado_app
You can now link your Notado and Readwise accounts so that everything you save to Notado automatically gets synced to your Readwise account ready for your next Daily Review. Big thanks to @readwiseio for making this integration so simple!
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3:22 PM ∙ Jul 17, 2020

Library View

Notado was originally designed as a feed of content which could be easily tagged, filtered and searched. When curating a growing collection of saved content, however, it becomes imperative to have a higher-level view of everything that has been saved. With this in mind, at the end of July the initial version of the Notado Library was released.

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Notado @notado_app
Notado's new Library mode is available to all users today! You can either click "View in Library" on any note in your Home feed or use the link in the menu. The Library is the place to see all of your notes in the context of their original sources (articles, comment threads etc.)
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3:08 PM ∙ Jul 30, 2020

The current version of the Notado Library allows sorting sources chronologically, alphabetically, and by number of notes, while providing filters by note count and website, and the ability to tag all notes from a particular source.

August

Notado for Android

Whenever a product launches with an iOS app, the requests for an Android app are never far behind. At the beginning of August, the early access release of Notado for Android went live on the Google Play Store.

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Notado @notado_app
The early access release of Notado for Android is live on the Google Play Store! play.google.com/store/apps/det… 🥳🎉
play.google.comNotado - Apps on Google PlayNotado is a content-first approach to online bookmarking, where the paragraphs and sentences that make you want to bookmark something are treated as first-class citizens rather than pieces of additional metadata. With Notado, your bookmarks focus around selections of text, which are fully searchable…
2:18 PM ∙ Aug 4, 2020
2Likes1Retweet

Saving More Comments

In July, Notado had support for saving comments from Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters via their permalinks using either the Notado browser extension or Notado for iOS.

By August, this had been expanded to include Twitter, YouTube and Tildes. The integration of YouTube comments in particular was inspired by the use of YouTube comments as Quotebacks in blog posts.

Twitter avatar for @notado_app
Notado @notado_app
You can now save Tweets to notado.app using your browser, Notado for #Android or Notado for #iOS! Just right click with the browser extension, or share with one of the mobile apps. Easy!
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8:51 PM ∙ Aug 4, 2020

Editing Notes

By elevating user comments and discussions to first class citizens in content-first bookmarking, it became apparent that sometimes it is necessary to be able to edit the raw content for various reasons: to correct typos, to fix punctuation, to trim a saved comment down to just the relevant content etc.

This was addressed in August and now it is possible to edit the content of any saved note on the website.

Twitter avatar for @notado_app
Notado @notado_app
You can now edit notes at notado.app - perfect for the times where you have saved a long comment from #hackernews or #reddit and want to trim it down to the main point!
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5:51 PM ∙ Aug 4, 2020

September-October

Importing Saved Comments from Social Media Platforms

Many user comment-driven websites and social media platforms have their own internal systems in place for saving, liking, bookmarking or otherwise keeping track of your favourite comments.

With a frictionless system for saving new user comments to Notado already in place, the next issue to address was a way to import comments that had been saved on other platforms, often over many years, into a user’s Notado account. Research and user feedback showed that this functionality was most desired for Reddit and Twitter.

Importing many years worth of saved content from one platform into a new system is always a daunting prospect, but with tools such as Notado’s automated tagging rules and the ability to selectively import individual comments, recently saved comments or your entire history of saved comments from Reddit or Twitter, it is easier than ever to liberate your saved comment history from walled gardens while also integrating it with your pre-existing organisational conventions.

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Notado @notado_app
Do you have hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of #LikedTweets that you'd like to organize, tag, search or export to use however you want? Now you can with notado.app! Set rules to tag Tweets as you import them, connect your #Twitter account, then import away!
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5:56 PM ∙ Oct 9, 2020
1Like1Retweet

WhatsApp and Discord

There is always a risk when building anything that relies on a third party system that something will change and leave you in the lurch.

Notado’s WhatsApp chat bot was built using a Twilio WhatsApp Sandbox account. Originally, this only required new users to send a single message to allow them to register with the chat bot and start interacting with it, however, in September Twilio made changes that required users to re-register with the chat bot every 72 hours, which made for a pretty frustrating user experience.

Short of being able to get Facebook to approve Notado for a WhatsApp Business Account, this essentially meant the end of WhatsApp chat bot for Notado.

After assessing possible alternatives, looking at onboarding experiences and the maturity of various bot ecosystems, it made sense to replace the WhatsApp chat bot with a bot on the official Notado Discord server which was already being used for support and feature requests.

As the Discord chat platform allows for richer interactions with user messages than WhatsApp, this provided a good opportunity to revisit the user experience of bot interaction for saving new notes.

Twitter avatar for @notado_app
Notado @notado_app
Unfortunately, due to some pretty big changes to the way that #Twilio's #WhatsApp accounts work, the Notado WhatsApp bot will be decommissioned at the end of next week :( However, it will be replaced by NotadoBot on our #Discord server discord.gg/WqtZUj4!
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10:06 PM ∙ Oct 7, 2020

The end result was NotadoBot, which is able to suggest source URLs for text selections that you want to save with a high level of accuracy, and can read user reactions to its messages to take further actions. For example, when suggesting a source URL for a text selection, the user can give NotadoBot’s suggestion a 👍 to proceed with saving the note to their account without any further interaction.

This is a big improvement over the previous WhatsApp bot which required users to interact at minimum with two share actions to the bot to share both the text selection to save and the source URL.

Quoteback Generator

Quotebacks started appearing in more and more blog posts over the summer and it made sense for Notado users who are also bloggers to be able to generate Quotebacks with a single click from their Notado account rather than having to copy their saved notes either to the Quotebacks browser extension or copy and paste text into the generator on the Quotebacks website.

In addition to the convenience of generating a Quoteback directly from a Notado note, it is also possible to make other little touch-ups like setting the author name correctly when quoting user comments (Quotebacks aren’t able to discern the posting user of a comment as the author of a quote by default), stripping extraneous prefixes or suffixes from a title, and toggling dark mode.

Twitter avatar for @notado_app
Notado @notado_app
Thanks to a little help from @tomcritchlow and @tobyshorin, notado.app can now generate #Quotebacks for your blogs and articles! Go to a saved note, click "Quoteback", customize it if you want, and that's it! Check out @thesephist's blog for some interesting reading!
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1:56 PM ∙ Oct 15, 2020

November

iOS Revisited

Over the Summer the general feedback on Notado for iOS was that while it was great for saving content, the in-app browsing, searching and filtering experience could stand to be improved. After a lot of optimisation under the hood, a new version of Notado for iOS was released on TestFlight in November which makes all in-app interactions an order of magnitude smoother, in particular filtering on tags and titles for users with note counts in the hundreds.

Twitter avatar for @notado_app
Notado @notado_app
Searching on Notado for iOS and scrolling your feed is now incredibly smooth compared to previous versions of the app thanks to a move to lazy loading 🙏
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7:25 PM ∙ Nov 5, 2020

While services like Reddit were spending time figuring out how to make the mobile experience even more miserable for users who choose not to download their apps, Notado was figuring out how to let users save content to their accounts even without having Notado for iOS installed. The end result? Notado now offers an official iOS Shortcut that allows users to save highlights from Safari to their accounts, no app required!

Twitter avatar for @notado_app
Notado @notado_app
Notado’s iOS experience has received a big upgrade this week! Notado for iOS has been updated with massive performance improvements, and an official iOS Shortcut is available for saving highlighted text from to your account even without the app installed! icloud.com/shortcuts/45e9…
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7:18 PM ∙ Nov 5, 2020

Filtering Untagged Notes

Unfortunately, automatic tagging rules are not always enough to tag everything you save, and if you are saving a lot, these untagged notes can get a little lost once they are no longer right at the top of your feed.

Enter the special “Untagged” filter! It’s quite a small feature, but a very useful and powerful one for the user that wants to make sure everything they save is tagged and categorised correctly.

Look Ma! No tags!

Editing and Merging Titles

Wouldn’t it be great if HTML <title> tags were consistent and reliable? Sadly, they are not, with some sites like Medium going as far as completely mangling them beyond any usability by truncating the title of the actual post, adding and then truncating the first line of the post, then adding the author of the post (do they truncate that too if your name is too long? who knows…) and the date of the post before finally capping it with a | Medium suffix at the end. Not at all what we want to see in a neatly organised Library.

In less deliberately infuriating cases, a user might post a link for discussion on Hacker News with the title modified to include the year, another might editorialise it when posting it for discussion on Reddit, and before you know it, you have saved a highlight from the link itself, a bunch of comments from Hacker News and Reddit, and now you have multiple notes in your Notado account that are linked to 3 ever-so-slightly different titles in your Library.

Oh well, you can’t fix the whole internet, but at least you can fix up your Library! Notes can have their titles edited either individually on their Edit pages or in bulk in the Library, and additionally it’s possible to just merge all the notes from one title into another (particularly useful when you want to keep comments from discussion sites under the same title as the discussed link itself).

Twitter avatar for @notado_app
Notado @notado_app
New this week in Notado, bulk and individual title editing and title merging! Hate the way #Medium articles abuse the HTML <title> tag and mess up your Library? Now you can fix it!
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7:28 PM ∙ Nov 10, 2020

What’s Next?

If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering what’s next for Notado.

Well, since Notado is now on Substack, you can expect more detailed updates here around both existing functionality and workflows, and new features as they get added. Additionally, you might also see technical articles from time to time that take a deep dive into the technology choices being made and the technical challenges being faced behind the scenes.

If all of the excitement contained in this post wasn’t enough, there is still one big announcement to come this year. Stay tuned.

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November 2020: Four Months of Notado

notado.substack.com
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Luca Conti per Saper Imparare
Dec 1, 2020

The Android link is for iOS :-(

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