Qwotebook Tracks Quotes by Friends, Famous Quotables

How many times have you logged on to Twitter and seen somebody note in a tweet: "OH", standing for "Overheard"? Some of these "Overheard"s are a doozy. But with Twitter's ephemeral nature, they fade as time moves on. Now, there's a site that aims to capture all the top quotes, both from the world of history, but also the world of the present, online in one place - called Qwotebook. The new site lets you "Qwote" your friends, attribute "Qwotes" to them and even provide context. The result is a fun site that acts as a quote book for the Web.

Drew Olanoff, an oft-quoted friend of mine, and brains behind the site, says, "I'm passionate about quotes." And one can see why from looking at the earliest aspects of the site. Coupled with top excerpts from friends in the social landscape, you can see quotes from famous people including Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama and others. The result is an insightful mix of funny sayings and overheards intermingled with advice, friendly comments and observations.

With a goal of "Making Quotes More Social", Qwotebook is all about quotes submitted by its users. Submitted Qwotes are displayed with the most recent chronologically on top, as with many social sites, and each quote displays the user who submitted the entry and the user who said it. If the user doesn't yet exist, Qwotebook will make a page for that person. (As I did when I added a quote from Ronald Reagan last night)

My Profile, Showing Qwotes I Have Added

If a quote has context, only mutual friends who are connected can see the context of the qwote, allowing for some privacy.

A Quote from Adam Ostrow I Found

Words of Kurt Cobain, Posted by Drew

Over time, as your qwotes build up, your profile displays not just the qwotes you have entered for others, but also those that are attributed to you. You can "Favorite" some quotes by clicking the star to the left of the quote, and these will be displayed on your profile under your favorites tab.

One of Drew's More Qwotable Moments

Drew is not rolling this out as a one-man project. A duo of developers from the site I Heart Movies are the coders behind the scenes making everything work, and they recognize there are a number of features they want to add to the site over time. I have already seen opportunities where I would want to make a comment to a quote and explain what it means to me, or even provide some feedback. I can see situations where somebody qwoted could reject a qwote outright and say they never said such a thing, or maybe, like other sites, you would want to hide all updates from a specific user (like Einstein, for instance). But for a gen-one site, Qwotebook makes sense and could be a lot of fun. So go sign up and get to qwoting.

There are a number of invites with the code of "louisgray". Go to http://www.qwotebook.com and get started.