The idea of annotating the Web has been around for a long time. It goes back to a failed Web 1.0 startup called Third Voice. Today there are a handful of Web startups (Diigo, Fleck, Stickis, ShiftSpace, TrailFire) that let you mark up any Web page by adding virtual sticky notes or comments in a sidebar. One of these, ActiveWeave/Stickis, had to reboot as BlogRovr and eventually sold itself to BuzzLogic.
Now, a new startup that officially launches today, Reframe It, is trying its hand at the same game. The company has raised $700,000 from AD Gilhart & Co., and it boasts an impressive advisory board which includes Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Howard Rheingold. (Dyson was also an angel investor in ActiveWeave). But it is not clear how Reframe It will distinguish itself from the other Web annotation startups that have so far failed to spark a lot of interest among users.
Reframe It is a browser plug-in for Firefox or Internet Explorer that lets you highlight passages of text on a Web page and add your own comments in a side pane. Comment can be private, public, or visible only to certain groups. Anyone with the Reframe It plug-in can then see those comments in their side pane as they browse the Web. Reframe It also has a Twitter-like social feature that lets you follow other people’s comments, as well as comments within groups. You can follow these comments in an RSS feed, which you can track in your blog reader or other services such as FriendFeed. To help get you started, Reframe It allows you to import your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and (soon) LinkedIn and other services.
The service itself does a decent job of letting you markup the Web and read other members’ comments in context. The problem, as with all of the similar services that have come before it, is that the chances of coming across a Web page that has Reframe It comments is pretty small. So the side pane (which at least is collapsible) will be pretty useless for most people. The comments also are slow to load. It might appeal to heavy commenters, however.
But even there, disassociating comments from the pages where they appear is not always a good thing. Comments are becoming such an integral part of most Web pages (especially on blogs and media sites) that the best way to ensure the most people will read a comment is to add it directly to the page through each site’s commenting system. ReFrame It comments are only visible to other people who have added Reframe It to their browsers.
That is not to say that there is no value in extracting comments and republishing them as original content. In fact, some comment systems such as Disqus aim to do something similar by treating each commenter as an author and collecting their comments across all sites that use Disqus. Similarly, the ability to comment on links collected in FriendFeed or Facebook help to elevate and highlight the comments themselves. But the reason these discussions are interesting in their own right is because they are occurring among your friends or people you care about. What FriendFeed has shown also is that you don’t need to comment on the Web page itself. All you really need is the link.
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WTF is this?
lol
Typical lightweight factually-challenged puff piece.
Your publication sucks
I’m sorry to hear your startup wasn’t accepted for T50.
For those who have a Google account and are worried about loosing their annotations/highlights in case these startups go down, check out Yawas.
It stores your highlights inside Google Bookmarks. Google servers have a pretty good track record of being available 24/7.
Hmmmm. highlight passages of text and leave an annotation? Sounds a a lot like Farhad’s DotSpots.
Dotspots launched at TC50 (1 month ago).
Dotspots is in invite-only Beta.
Here is the link to this addon for firefox where the first review is from Sept. ‘07 (1 year ago):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/5677
The idea of annotating the Web is much older than Third Voice. Annotations were in fact an early feature of the Mosaic browser in 1993.
and now 15 years later in troubled economic times some start up gets 700,000 to have a go at it…. Amazing, I need to pitch some of my “re-hatch” ideas to the VC’s, i don’t get half the crap they fund….
My understanding is that this was a debt-financing, not equity-financing round.
This didn’t work in Web 1.0, either.
pass…
http://gatesandjobs.blogspot.com/
But Erick, The reason those services tend to fail, is that they scale so poorly by design, both downward and upward. They scale down poorly because there is very little incentive for anyone to join while there are very few comments and commenters out there, and they scale up poorly because every page view in every browser requires a request to a central server. Add a million users surfing away, and you have a recipe for instant failure.
While the idea of annotating the web is very appealing (and as old as hypertext itself, of course), it’s just not feasible in its naive incarnation. For it to work properly, you would have to decentralize it - tie it directly to the web server, probably by making a few subtle changes to the HTTP protocol. But so far, I’m not aware of anyone calling for that solution.
What’s truly surprising is how a startup like Reframe It managed to get funding from Howard and friends, with a tried-and-infeasible concept like centralized web annotation. It’s a beautiful idea, but it’s just not going to be practical.
I like the “decentralized server” idea as well. I’m just not sure about the technical requirements to achieve it. They could open source their backend and hope to gain traction through so many people using their backend. But, most companies get scared when open source comes up in conversation.
Currently, I use the ff extensions ‘Fireshot’ (free version) and ‘Scrapbook’ both of which keep local copies with nothing stored on someone else’s servers. Then I just put it on our local server, and send a link via email.
Rafe (webware) also mentioned that there is a publisher’s version that can be installed via JS similar to disqus. Seems like a hybrid of disqus and friendfeed.
Jens,
You raise two good points.
1. We wrestled over chicken or egg argument ourselves. We are fully aware that we have to give every user a compelling reason to use Reframe It that instantly gives them comments to interact with. While in the beginning serendipitously finding comments will occur less frequently email sharing and RSS syndication will let people share web content they find in a more discussion friendly way. Our website reframeit.com (plug =) also aggregated comments with the social functionality you would expect. Adding friends and making groups goes a long way to ensure that the margin will not sit idle and collapsed on your browser.
2. As for technical scalability we are fully aware that millions of users will create a challenge but centralized data aggregation is how you create a compelling platform that connects comments, ideas, and people across multiple web pages. This is a major part of our mission and a cool feature. Comment across many web page strung together by groups, keywords, and friends.
Thanks for your feedback!
Erick is right that a user must find the same web page someone else made a comment on to really interact with a “community” but that is where new web 2.0 tools make this space different. Comment sharing via email and syndication over RSS mean user do not have to stumble across other comments they can share and feed them to their website.
Full disclosure: my email is jeff (at) reframeit.com
Reframe It does much more than just allow users to annotate the web. Reframe It’s social features ultimately puts users in control of how they want to go about using the tool. By joining and creating groups on Reframe It, users are able to congregate and collaborate to do more than just comment on a sentence or two. With the platform, members can band together in a scavenger hunt to collect information throughout the web and have it neatly organized to clearly display the contradictions, the similarities, and the true or false nature of posted online information. Build networks, start a community, and stay in control of the information you see! Reframe It allows you to do all of this!
Check out our website to learn more at http://www.reframeit.com
i think it’s useful for personal use at least. Often web pages are too long to finish in one shot, and I’d like to mark the last paragraph for current session. It might make sense to create multiple “channels” for each page, so user with different perspective can select different topics.
The system will also face spam issues I think.
We are being very vigilant against Spammers and people who violate our TOS. We are taking steps to make sure that spammers do not flood the system with bogus comments.
Jeff (at) reframeit.com
I’m curious, how does ReframeIt generate revenue, or hope to generate revenue? What is the long-term goal from a business growth perspective?
Josh
We generate Revenue from allowing sponsored community groups to identify groups in any comment. That means comment made by particular groups will carry a moniker of the groups and website link. In the long term we are targeted to become the premier way to extent online communities to external web content. This will allow a user through their comments to bring discussions of content to any other web content.
i want to get a good web name as well
Annotated links: http://alink.linkstore.ru
a small mashup lets you combine together a link (links) and post-it note
Where is the contextualization. How can you strong together multiple website.
Well I went to the page - chose “Pages Menu” and got -
500 Internal Server Error
This can’t be great.
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