Back in November, I reviewed a product called Summarity that summarized websites on the fly so that you didn’t have to read an entire page to get the relevant information. However, as a researcher, sometimes you want to point lawyers to a specific article, but really want them to see a specific section of that article so that they can quickly see why it is relevant to their research. To do that, you can use a new product called Sniply.

Sniply (snip.ly) is a web URL shortener, but it also allows you to set focus on a specific section of a webpage, and even add comments to explain why you’re pointing to this section of the page. This is particularly useful if the person you are sending the snip.ly link to is someone that has a short attention span. (I imagine that some one’s face just popped up in your head just now???)

The process is simple, effective and free! You can connect Snip.ly to your Facebook or Twitter account, or you can use it as a guest user. Snip.ly simply adds an overlay to the web page with the portion you’ve highlighted, plus any comments you’ve added. Here’s a quick example:

Let’s say there was something in last week’s Elephant Post that I wanted a friend to read. However, I really wanted her to focus on the part that talked about “competitive intelligence” and breaking bad news. Using snip.ly, I can draw her eye to that paragraph simply by sending her the snip.ly link.

Step One: Paste the link into snip.ly and click next (or, use the bookmark tool that allows you to just do it right from the page you’re on!):

Step Two: Select the portion you want to highlight.

Step Three: Add comments, select the image you want to include, and determine if you want to directly share it to Twitter, Facebook, email it, or if you just want to get the shortened URL.

Once you have the snip.ly URL, send it to the person and when they click on the link, they’ll see an overlay with your snip.ly comments.

How easy is that??

If you’ve connected snip.ly with your Facebook or Twitter account, it will save your links if you ever need to go back and review your work. The only issues I saw with this was that it didn’t let you delete those links if you wanted to clean up your history, and it sometimes would not get the formatting exactly right… especially if you’re highlighting numbered lists. Both of which seem pretty minor considering the usefulness of this resource.

Give snip.ly a try and let me know what you think. Heck… even send me a couple of snip.ly links of stuff you think I should read!!