In 1999 Eng-Sion Tan launched a company called Third Voice, a browser plug-in that created a sidebar on web pages and allowed surfers to annotate the page by adding their comments. The service quickly devolved into web graffiti and shut it’s doors two years later.
Even though Third Voice is gone, the idea had some value. And soon Jean Sini and Marc Meyer will be launching something that has some of the characteristics of Third Voice, but which will not have the same graffiti result. They call it Stickis.
Stickis is still in private alpha. I don’t have credentials yet (they are keeping it very quiet and don’t want screen shots on the web), but Marc and Jean came by last week to give me a peak at the service. You can request an alpha invitation on their home page.
To be honest, it took me a while to get it. The reason: they’ve built a platform that has at least two or three killer applications and I saw so much in so short a time that I was getting lost. I slowed things down by asking dumb questions and, in the process became pretty fired up about stickis in general.
Once you are registered, you can add a “sticki” to any web page with your notes, which can be in the form of text or dragged in images. Every time you return to that page you can pull up your sticki. For lots of sites that I interact with, the ability to keep these notes is very interesting. Notes can be shared with friends or kept private.
You can also subscribe to feeds from other sites, and if those feeds have linked to the current site you are visiting that content will also appear in the stickis. For instance, If you were to go to the Sticki site, and you had subscribed to the TechCrunch feed, you would see this post included in the sticki.
They’ve also included a master page to manage the content you’ve distributed on various pages, and add feeds and friend’s content.
Marc and Jean are in the process of raising an angel round – everything to date has been created on their own dime and with their own time. They’ve been working on it for about a year.
Hey Mike, thanks for the post! It took us a while to refine and build up the metaphors and flows we foster with stickis, so it was great seeing you grokking them, in no time at all, after the initial shock.
Can’t wait to get this plugin!!! Many time I am looking at some interesting web applications and would like to quickly see they have been profiled by Techcrunch. This would be perfect!
good grief! it’s 1999 all over again.
This sounds very similar to a plugin for firefox called “outfoxed”. Same concept, users post reviews of sites as well as whether they are good, bad, neutral. Of course, “Stickis” sounds much more indepth.
Outfoxed can be found here for comparison:
http://getoutfoxed.com/about
Can’t wait to be able to play with it!
Great idea, however, I’m at a loss as to how makes a buck with this concept.
Also check out Wikalong, web annotation that attempts to solve the graffiti problem by making the annotations editable:
http://www.wikalong.org/
This also sounds like another Firefox extension called ‘PurpleBunny’ used to write comments about web pages…
http://www.purplebunny.com
I’m have trouble understanding why you think Stickies, Diigo and trailfire are in the same category.
Trailfire is a tool of self expression … blogging light.
Diigo is a tool for research with advanced bookmarking features
Stickies feels like an advanced RSS reader. I’ve only had this one for about a week so i could be wrong…
The only thing i see in common is marking the pages or tags. What people use them for and how they present the content they create is VERY different.