An interesting new iOS app that allows you to highlight and share screenshots of webpages on Twitter. I wasn’t aware of this trend until I saw Joe Caiati’s piece about it on dot info. I’ve seen people tweeting screenshots of their notes application as a way to write more than 140 characters without the use of a third party service, but screenshots of webpages with highlighted text is brand new to me.

I’ve mostly ignored this “text shots” (or “screenshorts”) trend until Neven Mrgan noted one of OneShot’s most compelling features:

It also promises to do something magical: figure out from your Safari screenshot the actual URL of the source page. Or rather, it promises to try it. The screenshot doesn’t actually include the URL, so what (I think) the app does is, it runs OCR on the URL at the top of the page, then checks that website for recent articles.

Now here’s where magic meets honesty: OneShot shares its uncertainty with you. If it’s not totally sure about which article you want to highlight, it has you choose it.

OneShot’s ability to figure out the URL to the webpage you’ve taken a screenshot of is fascinating to me. And, I love that the app will guess and give you options if it doesn’t know for sure. It’s much better for the app to ask rather than simply publishing its guess and getting it wrong.

For myself and many others who already have an outlet for this type of quoting and linking, I don’t expect text shots to go too much further than a few experimental tweets. But, I could easily see this trend catching on with Twitter users who are looking to share links with more specificity.