Blaze Away with Trailfire
Michael Arrington
37 comments »
Seattle-based Trailfire just launched. It’s a combination of a social bookmarking service (such as del.icio.us) and a social web page annotation tool (see our coverage of the yet-to-launch Stickis). Basically, your comments and annotations are published on both your personal Trailfire page as well as on the website itself, for viewing by you and others with the Trailfire extension.
To use Trailfire, download and install the extension (available for Firefox and IE). This will add two buttons and a menu bar item. Use the buttons to open and close the Trailfire sidebar, and to mark a page (see screenshot). When a page is marked, a popup appears where you enter a trail name, a title and a description. When you mark other pages using the same “trail name”, they are grouped together. marks can be set to public or private, and users can choose to view just their own, or everyone’s, annotations on a website. Their product roadmap calls for the addition of social networking features like adding friends and having the ability to set group-based viewing permissions.
Annotated pages can also be shared with others, even if they don’t have the extension installed. Trailfire serves the page through their proxy server and adds the appropriate code for the annotation. More information about Trailfire is on their About page here.
Companies continue to tweak the del.icio.us model of social bookmarking in an attempt to find the right mix of features and usability to appeal to a mass market crowd. I like the ability to bookmark and annotate a page in a single action - others may like Trailfire, too.
Trailfire was founded by CEO John O’Halloran and CTO Pat Ferrel. They closed a $2 million venture round from Voyager Capital and individual angel investors.
Doesn’t the Firefox extension Diigo do roughly the same thing? I find it really useful for sharing useful snippets with colleagues at work - saves shouting over the office all the time!
The question is: will Delicions be able to defend its turf, maybe leveraging the critical mass it already gained?
The question is: will Delicious be able to defend its turf, maybe leveraging the critical mass it already gained?
Sounds like Third Voice. Either we didn’t learn anything in web 1.0 or, like fashion, what’s old is now new again. See also shadows.com, etc.
I did not like this concept in 1999 when Third Voice came out.
I still do not like this idea.
I think this is just another boring app the add to the heap, it lacks originality in a sense that it basically mashs up 2 already existing apps. Thumbs down on this one sorry!
So sick of all the social bookmarking start-ups. Isn’t this area crowded enough? And, this may cause some stir, but I still don’t think the idea of social bookmarking is all it is made out to be.
Way too complicated …
Well, I’m not impartial, but I think the ability to see at a glance what those you care about have to say about what you’re browsing is the seed of a great idea.
The hard and exciting part in this sort of thing is not to deliver the world’s ramblings to a user’s browser page, but to deliver only their community to it, and do so in a personalized, controllable, unobtrusive way. In essence this is a vertical, socially-segmented search on every web page access.
Third voice and similar notions didn’t meet the goal of “editorializing the clutter” but just added to it. The new generation of tools following in their footsteps need to pay attention to how to do this if we’re to fulfill the potential of the next-wave, social web.
As an aside, the term “social bookmarking” is very unfortunate, in my opinion. Diigo’s term “social annotation” is far better, as it gives a sense of the community adding information to wherever it is relavant on the web. This is the start of breaking the “portal”, destination-centric paradigm that has dominated the web.
Yawn. Don’t these features already exist in free extensions for Firefox users? Either Mystickies or Internote or Diigo or Scrapbook…
Now…what if browsers came pre-built with this type of functionality that you could turn on or off. That’s far more useful than trying to get a ton of people to all agree on the one extension of platform to use…
Maybe what is too timeworn is the title “Social Bookmarking.” First it was a way to bookmark and share the collection with others. Then the idea of tagging came along to help categorize pages. What we are trying to build is the Social Web by allowing people to rewire and remix a slice of the web and share that. We think that allowing users to affect the web at large is a pretty big idea that goes far beyond the typical use of social bookmarking.
Mike, great story - especially with the screen shot showing Payments News!
Best, Scott
Hey I just loaded it and I love it but it brought my Flock browser to a screaching holt. I un-installed and I am back to my normal surfing speed. It also disabled my links menu bar.
I like it
While TrailFire does have a similar premise to Diigo, the implementation is quite different. TrailFire only allows general comments on a website, but Diigo offers real annotation features, meaning that people can add highlights and in-situ sticky notes right on any specific portions, may they be text or images, of a webpage (just like when you’re reading a book!)
You can also do a full-text search on “clipped” or highlighted contents only, in addition to searching in tags, titles, comments, and the entire pages. We also offer publishing your highlights and annoations as blog-posts with one simple click. In combination with all the other advanced functionalities, Diigo is the perfect research companion, and much more than simple bookmarking.
Who funds these things? What a waste of $2 million.
I just tried it and the performance seems awesome. I was never a big Diigo fan as I always wanted it to have better capabilities, and just messin around at the office with Trailfire, the applications seem endless. Seems to me to offer far more than “social bookmarking.” From a travel research standpoint alone, I think it has the capabilities to be an extremely functional tool. Hopefully it doesn’t kill my browser.
I visited the ‘Trailfire’ site and at least their interface and installation seems well thought.
I added my ‘Serge the Concierge’ blog to ‘My Trail’ and will see if anything happens.
It is true that there are so many of these tools around.
I guess one will see who is still standing when the dust settles.
Serge
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com
While Trailfire may have some similarities with other web applications, it does introduce two entirely new usage models. Bloggers can use Trailfire to extend the narrative of their blog across the web. With Trailfire, the narrative goes with the reader to other web pages; and it can bring the reader back to the blog. Bloggers gains more control over their audience. They can now extend their voice to other web pages. Secondly, Trailfire does not tag pages like social bookmarking products. A tag is a category name for a web page. A trail is a topic. You would use Trailfire to organize a trip to Hawaii, for example. Try to organize a trip in a social bookmarking product and then try it in Trailfire. You’ll see that the two are complementary, but have different usage models.
Just tried it. Busy graphics but doesn’t seem to have much real substance. If I need social bookmarking, it’s not easy to replace the network effect of del.icio.us. If I need web annotation, Diigo is the best I’ve seen so far.
I was comparing Diigo with trailfire and there is a huge difference. Diigo allows users to place a single square, colorless note with only text on a page. Whereas, trailfire, allows you to place a resizable ‘mark’ on a page.
Unlike Diigo the ‘mark’ can include; voice annotation, video, audio, photos.
What I liked the best is that it can automatically be linked to other marks to form a web linking system.
I find this exciting, useful and great.
ENOUGH OF THE POPUP CRAP!
This is a huge idea. The concept of linking trails together using voice, audio, and other applications is a revolutionary idea. This is more than just another social bookmarking site. Just use it and you will see for yourself.
If they can tweak it a bit and make the bubble marks load faster… this could change blogging. Instead of bitching on their pages about heartless conservatives or spineless liberals, people will be able to moan on the pages of the people they’re bitching about. Sticky notes need to load faster though.
Third Voice or not, I think that making the web fully writable is an idea whose time has come! I think both Diigo and trails are promising. Have been using Diigo for a week now and really love it — it is basically delicious+google notebook+Third Voice. Trails, lacking tags, is more of a navigation aid. Both serve to show what can be done by adding another layer on top of the web, which is just great.
The establishment wants to keep everything read-only, but a read/write web is our destiny!
http://news.com.com/Lessig+see.....02451.html
I spoke too soon…this application is actually pretty slick.
Arjun - in what way?
Arjun,
I agree, it is pretty slick!
The screen is very professional. I have tested it completely, but what I have seen is pretty good.
I should have said I have NOT tested it completely!
So - to clarify: I discovered how slick trailfire via Billmonk’s post here:
http://billmonk.wordpress.com/...../#comments
Without something like this, it was too hard to “get” why trailfire is unique. And too easy to stereotype it as “another collect-share-bookmark” site.