Sasha Kovaliov

Keep Your Readers Happy and Never Lose Them with Apture.

There is a lot of buzz right now about real-time web, search, etc. However, most of the people forget that in addition to real-time layer, we need efficient semantic infrastructure on the internet. Apture solves the problem and enables publishers to create multi-layered content and provides contextual content in an appealing visual way.

We are used to hypertext, but unfortunately its capabilities are not used at maximum. Each word in the text and given content has the definite meaning. Each and every word can be a hyperlink. Hyperlinks can lead to various media formats, not just text. However, any text abundant with links will lead to a reader’s distraction, as they open up in new windows and get the user far-far away from the original resource. If you have read Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars(a book that can be read starting from any page at any direction), you understand that Internet is the largest post-modernist book ever written. It’s all interconnected.

What we lack, are efficient means to control the flow of information and give readers the necessary content, whenever they need it and let them stay at the original source of information. Let’s take a simple scenario:

You come to a web-page, see a term that is new to you, you google it and never get back to the page where the term was used.

Apture lets you keep readers on your blog (supports most of the wide-used platforms) by adding the so needed contextual layer in a clean and attractive way.

I was actually surprised how easy it is to install the plug-in. You don’t have to configure a thing, Apture will do everything for you. The great feature is that you can insert mark-up Apture links right inside your browser, with no need to enter admin part of CMS (if you are using Firefox).

There are similar tools, like Snap Shots or blippr (that you can see on Mashable in the forms of smilies next to popular web-apps and brands). Blippr might be fitting Mashable well, however, it’s not very efficient in showing the right information to your readers, as it only provides one type of content – users reviews.

Snap Shots started as a Snap Preview Anywhere, which allowed you to preview any given link – a pretty useless application: I don’t want to see the way the web-page looks, I want to get the content! It seems that Snap Shots has evolved into 12 (!) various trademarked services and is capable of inserting various type of previews. Apture makes it easier and gives you more flexibility on the relevant content you select for readers. It even makes all the twitter usernames a contextual link as well, letting you to follow a user and see his last tweets!

Right now Apture is free of any ads, but it’s a perfect platform for contextual advertising. The monetization strategy is pretty simple and I wonder if Apture is going to insert any ads soon and provide free-ads paid plans.

I would love to see more publishers install Apture on their resources, so I don’t have to hit “Search with _insert your fav search engine_” button all the time.