Collaborative annotation of web pages is far from a new concept. We’ve covered the field previously; there is a variety of startups competing in this space all offering similar feature sets.
Singapore based SharedCopy though looks like it might be the next step forward.
It’s annotations on web pages, and more.
Like Fleck, SharedCopy does not rely on a browser plugin. Annotation is delivered within the browser and without the use of JavaScript.
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Registering though has its advantages. Bookmarking is built in and users are provided with profile/ bookmark list pages and user feeds for sharing. Pages can be saved for public viewing or for private reference. It’s a nifty add on that makes it more than just an annotation site; it’s potentially a De.licio.us substitute as well.
Like other annotation sites, SharedCopy also supports sending annotated pages to friends, complete with a tinyurl style shortening service.
One particular feature makes SharedCopy stand out from the crowd, and yet if the company was based in the United States it would potentially be a lawsuit waiting to happen.
SharedCopy takes a snapshot of the page being noted, similar to Google Cache, and uses that page as the basis for annotations.
The benefits are obvious. Where as Fleck loads a fresh copy of a marked site, SharedCopy shows a cached version of the page as it was at the exact time it was marked for annotation. The feature guarantees that what a later visitor sees is exactly what the original user intended. Links are provided to the original source site.
I know some publishers are not going to like the idea that their sites are copied. It’s lost page views and there’s potentially SEO considerations with the duplicate content, and yet no one really complains that much about Google Cache, or even Archive.org
The site comes complete with Twitter and Basecamp support with easy posting to both via a bookmarklet.
In its April review, Startup Squad called SharedCopy a good choice, and it’s exactly that. If it takes off other players in the market will have a game of catch-up to play. It’s a package with features that for me at least, make a lot of sense.
Whilst I still find your writing annoying, your hyperbolic prose is beginning to hurt your credibility.
Also, if you use the phrase “AJAX goodness” again I shall be forced to vomit on my computer and bill you for any needed replacement parts.
Hoping this meets with your approval,
I remain,
Your humble typist,
-Scott
point taken, comment removed.
In terms of hyperbolic prose I’ve got an inbox of Web 2.0 startups and services to look at, if I’m running reviews it’s either because I like the product or it’s particularly topical, sorry for sounding positive when I like something, would you rather I just lie, I could do 30 posts a day of boring plain factual statements instead
I like your writing Duncan and I actually believe they’ve added a new twist to an old concept here by making it a lot easier.
http://www.ebizmba.com
Thanks eBizMBA.
A couple of months ago, I began adding this type of functionality to http://www.myownsite.us as it complimented the rest of the site fairly well. As it’s yet to be completed, it’s not been deployed to the main site (yet).
On MyOwnSite.us you have the news you want, ability to track packages, weather, and maintain bookmarks. While the bookmarks allow you to get back to sites you once found, what they don’t allow is for you to see what may be taken down sometime in the future. That’s where this (furl.net/esnips.com) functionality comes in. By adding it into MyOwnSite, it’ll just be one more piece of basic functionality I don’t have to visit multiple sites to get.
I dont like the design of the website
this concept has failed time and time again…a lame “twist” isn’t going to save it. if people have no use for it, they have no use for it.
De.licio.us substitute? Diigo ( http://www.diigo.com ) is a much better candidate for that, IMHO.
One can also use Web-Marker for partial addressing of content which is not exactly annotation but on similar lines to Diigo.
PS: I helped develop the firefox extension mentioned above.
This looks like a great service; maybe maximizing RSS’s potential …
– I think ATOM is the next thing, in the reader / Url social sharing theme.
– ATOM has sooo much more potential – RB
FYI. Not sure why you say they do this “without javascript.” I couldn’t understand how they might accomplish this without a plugin or javascript.
Sure enough, the bookmarklet is a standard javascript bookmarklet.
Matt
from the company details provided to TC + it says so on their site, but this isn’t to say that it could be totally wrong….the bookmarklet is more of an extra you can use, it’s not required but obviously makes using it easier.
I see. You mean that others can read the annotated pages without javascript.
This might be of interest:
Content Owners vs. Content Mash-Ups
http://nextnetn...t-mash-ups.html
Duncan, thanks for the article featuring us.
@Prateek – me neither
we work on web design again soon.
@Toufeeq – Web-Marker is a great tool. I use it sometimes myself
@Matt – Javascript is not needed to view the annotation, only if you want to mark up.
We would love to hear any suggestions TC folks have for us.
If your looking for a business app that does this fully integrated with a bunch of other collaboration stuff check out http://www.centraldesktop.com
they have had “save web pages” w/ cache, full text search and annotation for a couple of years now.
We have been using this to track industry and competitors news for a while now.
This “feature” is nothing new.
James, it looks like you have a great web site and service going there, and the design isn’t *that* bad.
Nevertheless, James, It is a good start for Singapore in the web 2.0 game. Overtime , the system will have improvement, and having to feature in techcrunch will encourage more startup in singapore
This looks very similar to Jeteye – whatever happened to that good idea?
I ran into the Fleck guys last night at the Involver party at Harlot in San Francisco. These three guys from Amsterdam got a funny gag where they all show up to parties in white suits looking like Tom Wolfe or early Steve Martin. They really stick out in a dark night club where everyone is wearing black. They do another gag where they wear the same suits, but cheaper, and hand out Sharpies allowing people to annotate their jackets. Cute gag. pictures
The site comes with Twitter support? Great. It can build on the 5000 people in the world who use Twitter.
The concept is not particularly unique or particularly well executed. There really should be a couple of reasons to talk about new “products” since this clearly isn’t a business.
A) Extremely innovative product regardless of founding team – e.g. Friendster back in the day
B) Innovative product launched by experienced founders – e.g. Joost
C) Product launched by major company – e.g. GMail
If you’re unknown, your product needs to be amazing or you need to have some major hook-ups to get traction. If you’re well known, you’ll have some hook-ups to help you get traction. Obviously, if you’re a major company, you have a huge install base to push products on (which is why Gmail is just brilliant).
This is a feature, not a product. More on Living in First Life about why I wish this was a joke.
http://www.linebuzz.com is doing something similar, with an emphasis on inline comments and discussion (mostly blog-centric).
One problem with this and other tools is that they tie annotations to a specific URL.
But content is free: it is replicated across URLs, read by different tools (e.g. your Google RSS reader), etc.
So as a user, you end up not seeing annotations that should appear on the content you’re viewing, simply because you’re viewing it from a different URL.
So I think we need to have a content-based annotation system, not just one that is URL-based.
wrt “content is free”, I meant that content doesn’t want to only reside at a specific URL. I was not arguing that content is free of market value.
Looks good. I thought the concept was pretty cool. Similar to that first singapore web 1.0 startup that made it to fortune mag for postits. Can’t remember the name….
@James Seng : How can you release a product to the people without you yourself being happy with the UI. I am working on a product too and one of the reasons it isnt out yet and is still in private beta is because I would have spent a lot of time changing the UI.
Doesn’t work in Opera, seems slow and unresponsive.
I’ll be sticking with Diigo.
@Laurent – Yep, it is in our roadmap to have a related sharedcopy links.
@Harro! – It is called ThirdVoice, a spin off from Kent Ridge Research Lab. I remember them well because we are the only two tech startup that catch people attention in Singapore. (I developed the concept of internationalized domain names in 1999. it is now an IETF standard and is currently deployed all over the world)
@Prateek – The usability is more important to us then the eye-candy. We dont dismiss the eye-candy tho, but we are a small setup and thus we have to prioritize.
@Jamie Martin – We need to do some more testing on Opera. Thanks for the feedback.
This thing is hard to use. I want to be to click a link, go to a web page, add some notes, and others in my group can instantly see them. I hate bookmarklets, plugins, etc.
@jonah: I’d like to learn more about how “its hard to use”. Could you contact me? Hope to gain some insights
I think we are all missing something really important here. This is not about bookmarking. That is perhaps the least interesting thing about annotations. And most of these services are not getting the whole picture either.
What Third Voice did was allow users to create their own web on top of the Web. Sure it was clunky, you had to insert URLs into your stikis to link things together but for the first time any user could modify any page and connect existing pages up any way they wanted.
Fleck and Activeweave let you put URLs in your notes and Trailfire goes further with an interesting concept called a trail that automatically links notes together. Sure these can be used for bookmarking but that would be missing the big idea. Annotation and cross-referencing are nice simple applications of this technology but what is killer about all this is when people figure out that they can basically repurpose the entire Web by modifying pages and rewiring the connections.
@Ed – You made a very interesting observation of how these could be evolved into some sort of user-generated referrers on-top of the existing web, or “rewiring the web” as you called it.
We will see what we can do on this
this software is so buggy, highlights do not work quite often. and everything feel so slooow.
you guys are releasing an alpha version and pretending it to be beta, wasting everyone’s time.