According to an announcement on Kifi’s website, Google is set to acquire the Israeli-American developer and add it to Google Circles.
Kifi is also the name of the company’s messaging app that allows users to share websites quickly, images, videos, and links with just a few clicks.
“The mission at Kifi has always been to connect people with knowledge. We see a lot of alignment to Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” reads the statement on Kifi’s website.
What Google saw in Kifi
The company was founded in 2012 in Silicon Valley. It was initially known as Forty Two but then changed its name to Kifi (keep it, find it). Kifi would be added to Google Spaces to provide solutions organizing and sharing content, features that are looked forward to in Spaces.
The key behind Kifi is threaded conversations, such as Gmail or WhatsApp messages. Kifi lets its users create groups or channels depending on the subject they’d like to discuss. Kifi is integrated on Slack, Google Search, YouTube, Chrome, and many other Google apps. If it is linked to a messaging app, such as Slack, any message displayed on Kifi will also appear on the corresponding channel in Slack. Kifi allows users to highlight text, create libraries and spread knowledge over different instant messaging platforms.
Kifi aims to let its users keep anything they find online. This includes videos, relevant news articles, products, research topics, and much more. Kifi is sort of like an improved bookmark app, where one can connect with other people and share content with ease and without having to rely on your browser history to do so.
Users can download Kifi for Chrome here or its Firefox version here.
Kifi’s primary functions
The app supports hashtags among its notes, allowing users to connect seamlessly with coworkers to ensure everyone uses the same information and that there is a quick availability of reliable data. The chat function in Kifi is vital, as it allows a team to send messages on each page, focusing the topic of discussion towards the content at hand. There is a useful “look here” feature, so friends and colleagues can see one’s highlights on a particular page. To start a chat, users just have to click the Keeper button after they’ve installed the suitable extension for their browser.
When users send a link through Kifi, they can highlight a particular area of the website, so whoever receives the link will be directed to that specific section. Each piece of content that users send or receive through Kifi will be stored in a Library, which can be accessed by the members of a particular group. This is very useful for planning vacations, group projects, research, and anything that requires some way of organizing information that has to be accessed through its native URL.
Kifi also alters Google search. The first results will be those that are kept on Kifi’s libraries, counting the books of others. This is so the most useful information is the first available, since other users would already have reviewed it, thus being registered by Kifi in the process.
Source: Kifi