Collaborative annotation of web pages is something many people are working on. The newest entrant in the field, Fleck, is launching tonight at the TechCrunch party in New York. The Fleck team hails from Amsterdam.
The service is clearly in its infancy but could be just what some people are looking for. The basic idea is that one person can place notes on top of a web page and other people can view, change and add to those notes at any time. It’s got standard features like movable notes and bullet points, page histories and the ability to email a unique URL to an annotated page. The URLs are Fleck URLs, not the URL of the page you are annotating. The system is remarkably easy to use and relatively easy on the eyes.
Here’s a sample of Techcrunch.com with some notes I’ve added with Fleck. You should be able to make your own changes, save them and get a unique URL to share. That functionality is reminiscent of Instacalc, the wiki-like calculator I reviewed earlier this month.
This is a relatively crowded space, the two services I’m most familiar with for collaborative annotation are TrailFire and Diigo. Stickis is just around the corner too. Fleck’s primary point of differentiation so far is that anyone can use it without creating an account or installing a browser plug-in. That could make all the difference. Other annotation services generally have a higher barrier to adoption by casual users. The primary barrier to using Fleck is that it only supports Firefox - hopefully that will change soon, because accessibility is what the service really has to offer so far.
I can imagine myself quickly adding questions to pages on a site I’m reviewing and emailing those annotated pages back to a company. They could respond immediately on the page, with no need to download anything or start an account with the annotation service. I like that. I also like that those collaborators would have a list of all the pages we’ve collaborated on created for them automatically. Fleck is even easier annotation than the similar service AmberJack is easy site tour creation.
There’s a long list of features that Fleck aims to roll out in time, including photo integration, arrows, multi-language support and Pro accounts with premium features. If they can make this a more fleshed out service while retaining the incredible simplicity it offers now, Fleck could grow into a particularly solid contender in the web page annotation space.
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It’s pretty neat. Though this has been tried in the past and not gone all that well (third voice was the first I think). Having said that, a simple tool to markup a page with comments could work well, just not sure what the audience size would be.
It’s nice - and simple. And that’s the real strength. Looks good to me.
In addition to the basic “annotate-share” core expirience, fleck also enables an alternative cool way to comment on blogs and any web content - kinda floating comments.
So it’s also somewhat of a “layout” tool that can enrich the rather monotonous traditional blog commenting style.
A very useful service indeed! I wonder if web annotation could give birth to a whole new community of users, much like Wikipedia did. And there could be some interesting advertising opportunities for web annotation, too.
Microsoft introduced web annotation quite a while ago directly in IE however it required a discussion server to work properly. It’s still on the tool bar of most IE installations. Not the easiest thing to set up.
Looks nice, but the tags don’t line up on the page for me, using Mozilla 1.7.12 on Windows XP. Actually I get a lot of flashes when I mouse around the page anyway, which leads me to think the page is not rendering correctly anyway.
Is TechCrunch IE-only? Is Fleck?
Curious… it’s always discouraging to me if something doesn’t work with the “other” browsers. Because I’m using Blazer on my Treo more and more, I’m increasingly of the opinion that simpler websites (or at least more universal websites) are more interesting.
check it on IE7, its not working well.
According to Fleck, web annotation will only support Firefox for the time being - IE functionality will be added after the beta is over.
It’s cute, but the ‘flecks’ for the Jason leaving AOL column are showing up over the post about Fleck itself. I’m thinking that’s not supposed to happen.
Works perfectly in firefox for me, except for one thing: it doesn’t recognize when the content of the page is updated. your annotation about that photo is smack dab in the middle or a block of text
I imagine that they’re just using a number of pixels as an offset to specify where the note goes. I cant think of any really good workaround for this except to attach the notes to a specific html element, which sounds like it can get very complex very quickly.
still like how smooth it works and for static pages it’d probably be very useful
To make it work properly they would need to make the positioning relative to div’s (or other objects) on the page — attaching a comment to a div.
If they haven’t even done that it’s pretty lame. Moving those things around as page content moves would present some interesting problems as well — let alone when content changes URLs.
That example may not be the best. I put the notes on top of the text knowingly. It’s really best for static pages or design discussions probably. Or it’s too lightweight to be useful - don’t know yet.
(Apologies for the self-promotion - this was cleared through Marshall)
As it happens, we’ve built something like this at DashNote. We’re a bit coy about making a lot of noise about this since rough edges remain (which will be cleared up in a few days), but it may be worth taking a look. Some key differentiators:
1. You can annotate specific content on the page (text, images, or image regions for things such as photo-tagging)
2. We preserve the notes and the original page (annotations and context)
3. As noted in another (insightful) comment, positional data is also maintained though there are some issues when comments are placed in IE and viewed in Firefox and vice-versa.
Here’s an example: http://dashnote.com/snapshot/6mD4esJFluU
for now, it appears that if you want to annotate an archived page, you’ll need to store it yourself and then annotate….furl did this a long time ago, though there are legal implications (eg. storing a member only item, like subscription access resources and then making them publicly available)…hmm, and oddly i put in google and it brought me to the netherlands site by default (even though it was google.com) but no such problem with yahoo…however, i did put in the cached version of google’s own home page and it was fine, so maybe using cached version would be the safest way to avoid annotating pages that change a lot or go away?
This is definetly a good idea, though I don’t really want to have to remember special urls in order to see the annotations. There should be a browser plug-in that notifies me when a site is annotated and lets me click on it to load the annotated version.
Diigo is still the best with direct blogging and simultaneous bookmarking. Yes, you need to install the toolbar to get all the features but Diigolet button works well too. Tagging is also possible. Floating toolbar on the webpage can be annoying also.
We are still at the Techcrunch party. But tommorow ill answer all the questions posted about Fleck here. Thanks!
Does it really make any difference which blogger breaks the story first.
Is it really practical to drop a good story because of not being first
Everyone has their own audience
http://blog.fleck.com/2006/11/16/mashable/
Let’s make WEB 2.0 Politics-Free
This is pretty neat annotating device. Itwould be nice if the comment bubbles were draggable.
Other than that, what is main incentive behind user adoption and achieving critical mass. Is this adding more complexity in an already saturated sea of data types?
I know some companies are working on services that all the users viewing same page can communicate each other. so if Fleck can combine this function, maybe this new idea will be more meaningful.
This reminds me too much of the defunct ThirdVoice with all the messy stuff left by people on a web page.
That’s why we have blogs today: if you want to annotate a page, just blog about it and people will easily find it through Google Web Comments.
Looks like your review has taken its toll on Fleck. I’m repeatedly getting the “Too many connections” error. What do you call it? The Techcrunch Effect?
Really frictionfree. “TOO MANY REQUESTS”
@Nemrut. I my browser (Flock) the comments are all dragable. Not sure why yours aren’t.
As to the comments not following the content. I agree, that there is an issue there still. I this particular case though a simple workaraound would have been to post the annotations on the post’s individual page.
Fleck is one of the best product techcrunch has profiled in a long time. It looks very useful. It seems to be more of a person to person tool, unlike ThirdVoice because of the unique URLs. ThirdVoice and the similar clones (most recently the AboutUs debacle) were focused more toward providing general comments about web pages to anyone who came across the page. This seems more suited toward allowing two people who know each other to share comments. I think it’s marvelous as someone who likes to discuss tech news with the small number of friends that follow it. We’ll see how many people outside of our little web 2.0 clique adopt it.
Am I the only one who finds the annotations annoying?
Fleck works just fine in the recent Webkit (Safari) build I’m running.
Timeout…I just gave fleck praise on here and now it gives me problems. Maybe I’m missing something. I posted annotations using firefox and tried to view them in ie. They were at the bottom of the page, completely out of context. Likewise it was hard to get the url to send via IM. They have the little send via email (which was slow) but no way to just get the dang annotated url to send. Maybe I’m just slow today or maybe the UI could be more intuitive. Bah.
Cool, but I really need to be able to see if a page has annotations without having to turn the thing on full blast.
Stand-by mode, if you would.
Thirdvoice was my thought as well, although this doesn’t force you to download extra software which was one of the reasons why third voice failed.
Has anyone worked out the copyright issue though? They say they don’t store pages, just pull them, but how much of a difference does that make in legal terms? Especially since they seem to be rather fussy about their own stuff. (”You may not use any 3rd party toolbars or scripts to access Fleck.”)
Marshall-
I think it is very important when you mentioned that Fleck is best for static pages. But the only way a product like this can take off is if it is used heavily in dynamic blogs and news sites.
I love the fact that it is so light-weight, but the Fleck team needs to rethink a way to retain relevant positions of their notes…and doing this and keeping it so light-weight will be difficult to implement.
I don’t know why anyone would use anything but Clipmarks for this.
I thought this would be interesting, nice idea, but it seems they launched about 3 months too early. The fleck bar keeps on standing in the middle of my screen, its driving me crazy. Why doesnt it stay on the bottom or at the top? The mailto function takes about 30 seconds to work?
This service is a really cool tool for collaboration on any web page. I like it a lot! It’s absolutely unintrusive that’s what I like about it most!
There are a lot of comments, so I’ll try to answer most of them briefly here, for more questions just mail me at patrick at fleck….
As Marshal puts it correctly, fleck is still in its infancy. There is still a lot to do (it probably never stops). Right now we are working in a coffee bar on 32nd street on the IE version.
Fleck doesn’t support IE yet. It probably takes another week before IE will work properly, but its IE…. you know!
Furthermore we had some difficulties with the ‘TechCrunch’ effect, so some people got an “too many requests” error. That’s solved.
Fleck is inspired by an article of Kevin Kelly in the Wired (We are the web) Later on we read all about Third Voice and Get Goeey, we call it our 100 million dollar research project (as all companies trying to make the web more democratic raised about 100 mio in total) and all journalists were so kind to describe all problems they had in detail. As Joel putted it, fleck uses unique url’s, unlike Third Voice, who piled up all notes per URL. You can imagine what that does to the frontpage of CNN!
The notes are dragable if you ‘take them by the ear’.
Did we launch three months too early….? Might be, but we’re very glad we launched, development goes a lot faster thanks to a lot off people who are mailing their problem(s), we’re tackling them while communicating with them.
This is only the beginning and we hope people like the basic idea (and a lot of people clearly do). A lot of stuff is on our wish list (duh, tell me something new!) and will be implemented along the way.
As of today Fleck also supports IE. So why not give it another try? Comments and suggestions are welcome to: boris@fleck.com
Awesome !!! works great in IE now for me … rather for those who I send flecks to ..