Montreal Tech Watch

Georges Duverger, a designer/developer, is now based in New York but a lot of you know his work for Montreal-based projects, for startups like akoha, or more personal tools like cineti.ca.

His website and recent projects cineti.ca demonstrate an interest in aesthetics, typography and finely crafted tools, not far away from swiss design principles, plus a sprinkle of zen minimalism. Georges reminds me of the sort of people who will make you crazy about kerning, margins, or the color tone of a font vs another. You think everytime there are more important issues at stake, and here’s a designer who commands a meeting because a heading is not grey enough, as if every single pixel or element in the webpage was a work of art.

And if you let free designers described above, you get projects like readon.ly. Started initially as a web experiment, named as highlight, the project received enough interest to get Georges working seriously on it.

The tool in itself allows anyone to sign in with Twitter. You’re invited to add a bookmarklet (similar to the ones provided by delicious or instapaper), and when you see a few interesting lines in a web page, selecting this content and hitting the bookmarklet will save it.

The tool is very similar to delicious in spirit, with navigation based on tags and users, and also on the principle that it’s first a personal tool, and then a social one. A big difference lies though in the highlights. Days after the initial save, we get to see why we saved a webpage, and in terms of discovery and social usage, we also get to understand why another user saved another webpage.

In my opinion, there is a lot of promise in readon.ly. It’s useful for heavy Internet users, but also anyone doing simple searches on the web. Think students, project managers, writers, journalists etc. It promises a simplicity heaven and a delightful experience far away from crowded content seen on popular homepages. Adoption will be also boosted thanks to the social aspect, much alike Twitter’s initial adoption. The readon.ly design is also very powerful, perhaps even more powerful than the Google algorithm, since it will be able after a while to pinpoint what’s more interesting in a webpage. Google guesses it from text used by websites in incoming links, while readon.ly will get the collective brains of its users to synthetize how and what content in a page is interesting.

Georges says future development depends on the community, since he doesn’t have a roadmap in mind. I am quite sure readon.ly will get big soon in design communities (think typography heads), and also amongst programmers/alpha crowd. I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes as big as delicious, although perhaps a little work with the logo and the avatars.

Congrats Georges!