How many of the articles you share on Facebook and Twitter have you actually read? Yeah…we know. Even news junkies are guilty of this, and reporters ironically may even be the most egregious repeat offenders.
It’s OK though; we’re not passing judgement. This habit to skim has brought us the screenshot share. Basically, for a while now people have been snapping screenshots with their phones, taking a picture of the part of the paragraph that they think is the most salient to share along with the link to the article, instead of just sharing the link and whatever commentary they can drum up.
Screenshots are also nice because they allow you to highlight a portion the text within a paragraph, share a picture of text on Instagram, and avoid copying and pasting an annoyingly long block of text on Facebook that will likely get ignored. People interact more with photos. It looks good, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
But instead of awkwardly highlighting within your mobile browser, trying to keep a section highlighted while using two fingers to press two buttons…and then if all that works, cropping the photo to remove the icon indicating your phone’s dwindling battery life, you should try one of these apps instead.
OneShot
Here’s an app that’s perfect for the conversational news junkie. OneShot is an app for taking screenshots of articles and sharing them to social media. It’s definitely a Twitter-centric app (likely because it was designed by former Twitter employees), but users can share to any platform, including Facebook or Instagram.
OneShot also gives your screenshot a makeover: You can pick a background color, the cropping is seamless, and the best part is it uses character recognition software to find the URL of the article and include it in the image. You can also share directly from the app, so there’s no need to switch apps, reopen a new post, and upload an image.
Xcerpt
The Android answer to OneShot is an app called Xcerpt. It has similar features, and will make your shares a lot more engaging. Xcerpt has tons of color options, and its cropping feature is way easier to use than most photo-editing applications that come on an Android phone.
Users can also share directly from the app to multiple social media platforms. And again, the great thing about this tool is that it reads the text in the screenshot, scans the Internet for the article, and confirms and inserts the link into the image in an attractive and sharable way.
Liner
This one is something a bit different. Liner is a web highlighter that works on both mobile and desktop, which is a huge plus. It’s not just for sharing, although you can do that super easily in the app to any social network, or even send your text clip a mobile message. Just like with Xcerpt or OneShot, you can highlight the parts of the text that stick out to you the most and share an image of that with your followers.
But what makes Liner different, and a little better even, is that it also saves the articles you’re reading in a list and keeps the parts highlighted that you picked out as the most notable. So you can return to your articles and skip right to the part you wanted to reference, without having to scan the whole piece to find that nugget. It’s great if you’re the type of person who’s always trying to recall something you read, but never have your finger on it.
You can even add comments to an article to save that sweet idea you had while reading.