Posting a quote from a specific article on Facebook with the link to the article underneath is one of the trends I noticed ever since people started sharing content heavily on Facebook. This type of pointing out a quote or a specific part of the article that moved you enough to share is not even possible on Twitter, where 140 characters is the limit. This is why the concept behind the Startup Chile incubatedmarker.tois so powerful.

Marker.to is a simple Chrome / Safari / Firefox extension that lets you highlight any web page and then share it via Facebook, Twitter, or in any other way you’d like via a short url. You can also go back to marker.to and see all the things you’ve ever highlighted.

Marker.to got a decent amount of press coverage from The Next Web,Life Hackerand a few other publications when they launched in October 2011, which got them some users. It’s interesting to see that some of the initial users (or maybe even new ones) have stayed with the product, as seen in their usersTwitter activity- people are actually sharing web pages they’ve highlighted! Right now, about 25 users per day are sharing highlighted stuff on Twitter, which is a lot more than most startups in our system are getting.

The marker.to team has also placed all the right viral elements into their product. Not only is the marker.to highlighter icon always staring you in the face if you installed it (it’s bright and yellow and always in your browser), if you click on one of the shared posts on Twitter, you will get a hovering box telling you to install it yourself or share the page on Twitter or Facebook. I also just noticed that if you select text on a webpage, a little highlighter button pops up right there prompting you to highlight the text you already selected.

The one thing to note in the web highlighter space, is that there are many competitors, includingHighlighter,Awesome Highlighter,Webklipper,diigo,Rooh it, and others who’ve been around for a while, some since 2008 or earlier, but have not exploded in popularity. The closest startup that has exploded in this space is Pinterest, which could be thought of as a highlighter for photos around the web. Can marker.to crack this space?

Image via married jane.