Highlight a web page and send it to your friends [web]: The Awesome Highlighter

The Awesome Highlighter
http://www.awesomehighlighter.com

One of the great things about the Internet is the ability to find just about anything and forward it on to your friends, be it YouTube, MySpace, Slate, Fark, etc. Many sites have their own mechanisms for sending articles and other links to recipients like StumbleUpon, but have you ever received a link from someone, only to find out that there was perhaps a sentence or two within all of that content that was really relevant?

The Awesome Highlighter is a web-site that helps draw your attention to the real meat of the site by...well, you guessed it, highlighting it.

The website is a sort of mashup of old-school highlighting, Digg, and TinyURL: You go to the main Highlighter website, enter in the address that you are going to send to your friends, then highlight the text you want your recipients to notice. The AwesomeHighlighter web-page keeps track of your highlighted entries so you can forward them out later.

You can even use multiple highlight colors, select different areas of the page, etc. - when you're done, you will end up with a shortened URL (akin to TinyURL) that you can forward on to your friends. My test page was a LifeHacker article from today: http://awurl.com/cnbkgj24269

AwesomeHighlighter also features a Firefox Add-in toolbar, which I prefer (although it takes up a bit of real-estate in your FF toolbar for two buttons), since you don't have to cut & paste URLs back to the Highlighter main page.

I did notice that it didn't work with all pages right off the bat - CNN had issues. This may be due to how the page is rendered, but I'm not totally sure. Best results are acheived by using direct track-back links instead of main pages (for example, you should go to a direct blog entry rather than the blog main page).

Overall, this is a very cool idea - I'd like to see the ability to save pages in time, so that if the content changes, the highlight would still be accurate.