curius.app: your portal to shared reading adventures

why i love curius.app and think you will love it too📖

Curius is a social reading and bookmarking browser extension. Besides easy bookmarking, it opens up a hidden layer on top of your browser that surfaces links saved and read by your friends (it's like a little portal into their reading world:). By now, I've onboarded ~15 friends of mine, many of whom engage with the tool frequently.

There are a few apps that I use daily and curius.app is one of them. I wrote this to be my "go-to" link that I could send to more of my friends instead of copy-pasting the same “pitch” every time. If you're a curious person who loves exploring rabbit holes and taking intellectual rollercoasters together with your friends, then I'm confident that you'll love this tool too.

Below are some ways I use Curius. Showing > telling, so I've added a bunch of screenshots. Skimming over them will already give you a quick taste:)

Curius as a Source of Intellectual Stimulation: Discover New Reads, Vetted by the Community

Curius lets me discover new readings by surfacing them in a new open tab. As it takes over the new tab space, it shows the recent bookmarking activity of people I follow.

The internet can sometimes get messy with information exponentially increasing, and Curius lets me filter that overwhelming noise and see what has been consumed by interesting people and friends I follow. Also, because it is a tool that is not constrained to a certain domain, it is used across many verticals. This gives me a glimpse into what people are reading, from the most interesting stuff in biology, philosophy, AI, comics, to arts.

Curius as a Conversation Medium: Discuss Reads with Your Friends or Strangers

For any reading, I can see highlights, comments, and discussions left by Curius users. I love highlighting and thinking “out loud,” and often find myself engaging with complete strangers and making friends online (I met a few people IRL because of curius:).

Sharing is caring - I also share readings with my friends and tag them anywhere across the internet. I have some friends on the other side of the world with whom I keep in touch by continuously sharing interesting reads with each other.

Curius as a Search Engine: Get Filtered Reads on the Topic You Want to Learn About

Curius lets me search across its huge pre-filtered database of pages. Whenever I want to learn about something, I search in Curius first, and only then do I go to Google/Wikipedia/ChatGPT. Curius has spread mostly by word of mouth (it did not have funding), which means that its user network is a self-selected community of some truly inquisitive minds.

Curius as a Bookmarking and Readings Tracker: Keep Things Organized!

Curius has a very frictionless way of helping me manage and keep my readings organized, including highlighting my favorite quotes. With one click, I can save my reading, and with another click, I can highlight a sentence. I can also create tags to keep things even more organized. Ultimately, this allows me to better manage my rabbit holes and online readings.

Curius, Like Any Other Tool… Also Comes with Its Downsides

1. The downside of this tool is that it can quickly become your “permitted” procrastination, and you might end up spending hours reading instead of doing tasks you're afraid or bored of. It can be an interesting distraction.

2. Curius is just a side project of some peers of mine; hence, it's not the fastest in development or the most elegant in support. It also only works on the web and is tied to your Chrome or Arc browser.

Finally

I hope you're convinced :) I always tell my friends that I want them to join Curius because of “selfish reasons.” I know that my friends are reading interesting stuff, and I'd love to tap into that too, and have a platform for asynchronous discussions on certain topics.

My curius link: https://curius.app/svitlana-midianko2

If you need your first curius read recommendations, drop me a message!