wakelet – Learning Aloud

The world of computer services is cutthroat. There are only so many users and with some categories of online service it becomes very difficult to compete with an existing service even if your app is better. Everyone wants to be where everyone already. It is great that some are willing to keep trying new approaches.

Wakelet thought it found an opportunity when Storify decided to close up shop. Finding that services you think are useful are shutting down is also a reality. Just getting folks to use your service is only part of the challenge. At some point, you also must find a way to make money so you can pay for programmers, servers, and bandwidth. Anyway, Wakelet, not yet at that point where paying the bills was the primary problem, made an effort to attract Storify users by offering an easy way to transfer user content.

I wonder how Wakelet will monetize what seems like a powerful and intuitive service. Classifying many online services is sometimes challenging because others based on personal needs may see the service in a very different way.

I would describe Wakelet as a tool for curation. Some might use a curation tool to meet a personal need (Evernote, OneNote). As I write for other educators, my typical process is to review multiple online sources I might want to cite/link and I need a way to accumulate these sources before the writing process beings.

I see most educators using Wakelet more as a tool to organize resources for others. For example, an educator might come up with an interesting task, locate some great online resources appropriate to this task, and then share the task description and resources with the students. One educator might do something similar to share resources with colleagues – an introduction explaining the goal and then the collection.

Wakelet would describe these curated resources as collections. What might differ from situation to situation is whether the curator wanted the collection to be private, shared with specific individuals, or available to the public. This is pretty much what Wakelet allows.

Wakelet can be used from various devices. The most general application I have in mind involves the collection and organizations of online resources. For this purpose, it is most convenient when Wakelet can be added to a web browser as a plugin/extension. I use it from the chrome browser. Find a useful resource, click the Wakelet icon that appears in the browser to bring up a dialog box to select the desired category from among those you have established. Or, just save the resource and worry about categorizing it later.