Quotle is an interesting beast. The best way to describe it could be that Quotle is a hybrid between OneShot and Instagram, but for book quotes. Available on iOS, it turns the good old habit of marking down quotes in a notebook into a social experience.
Designed by Olivier Desmoulin, there are three key components in Quotle. You can create quotes, you can share them, and you can follow people. While you might not be using all three parts, having these three features are essential to creating a compelling app.
First, the quote capturing part. You have two ways to capture quotes — you can either type the quote on your phone or scan some text from a paper book or an ereader. The app then processes your quote using OCR. Once you have the text of the quote, you can search for a book or manually fill the source. You can also tweak the style of the quote with fonts ranging from Georgia to Folio, Helvetica Neue Light and five other fonts. You can also choose a background color.
Then comes the sharing part. This screen is very reminiscent of Instagram’s sharing screen, which was one of the key features behind Instagram’s early success. You can add a description and share your quote on Quotle, Facebook, Twitter and Evernote.
Your quote is turned into a nice poster-style image on your social networks. I’ve come across many Quotle posts on Facebook and Twitter over the past few weeks, and they are an effective way to share a quote.
I know Instagram doesn’t have a public posting API, but it would be nice if you could open the quote image in the Instagram app as well using deep-linking. It’s a nice workaround and other social apps have been using this technique.
Finally, Quotle is a little social network by itself. You can follow people, like their posts and comment on them. I don’t see a lot of activity on there just yet, but it can only get better as the app attracts more users.
Instagram made Flickr obsolete as Flickr wasn’t made for mobile. I think Quotle is doing the same thing with Goodreads, and it’s about time.