Highly

» see highly.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Highly did one gesture. You dragged a finger across a sentence in an article and it became an image with a link back to the source, ready to post. The highlight was the unit, not the article, and the pitch was that the interesting part of most pages is one paragraph that nobody can quote without a screenshot.

Around that gesture sat the usual apparatus of a 2017 startup. Browser extensions and native apps fed a synced archive of everything you had ever marked, and you could follow other people's highlights the way you follow an account. It raised a seed round in 2017 and never disclosed how many people used it, which in retrospect is the number that mattered.

On 17 April 2019 Twitter announced it had hired the team. Twitter's line was that "their expertise will accelerate our product and design thinking around making Twitter more conversational", which is acqui-hire language for we wanted the people. Nine days later the iOS and Slack apps closed. The web service stayed up, unstaffed, until the end of January 2020.

~ the chronicle ~

~ bought for the team ~

An acqui-hire is a specific kind of death and this is a clean specimen of it. Twitter did not want the highlighter. It wanted two product people at a moment when it was publicly trying to make conversation on the platform less awful, and the fastest route to them was buying the company they had built.

The product was not shut down on the way in, which is the part that makes this grave odd. Highly's archive stayed queryable for nine more months with nobody maintaining it. Everything you had marked was still there and still syncing, while the people who could have fixed it if it broke were in San Francisco working on reply threads.

~ five days to export ~

The notice went out on 22 January 2020. The service was closing, and users should either download their highlights or push them to Instapaper or Readwise. The deadline was 27 January, "after which your collection will be inaccessible and subsequently deleted".

Five days is not much warning for an archive that had been accumulating for three years. It got worse on inspection: the official exporter would only hand back a thousand highlights. On 26 January, one day before the cutoff, Devon Zuegel published a repository with a scraper that pulled the rest, which is how anyone with a serious collection actually got their data out.

~ the closing line ~

On 31 January 2020 highly.co stopped serving the product and started serving one sentence: "Highly is closed. Thank you for lighting up the web with us." Today the domain does not answer at all, on either protocol, with or without the www.

The idea outlived the company. Readwise built an entire business on exactly this, and the Kindle's highlight export is the same primitive with a different reader bolted to the front. Highly's misfortune was that the gesture was easy to copy and the company behind it was worth less than its two founders.

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