The idea of leaving sticky notes on the Web for others to find has been tried many times, but has never really taken off. Third Voice dotbombed with the idea in the late 1990s, then Activeweave tried it with Stickis (only to abandon the idea in favor for an app called BlogRovr, which was recently acquired by BuzzLogic). The missing element was that there was never a social way to share the Web pages and people’s comments about them instantly.

A startup out of Florida called Slingpage thinks it has figured out a better approach. It lets you “sling” Web pages to your friends with one click, chat about them, and annotate them with sticky notes as well. It is just coming out of stealth mode and TechCrunch has private beta invites for the first 500 readers to sign up here. (Warning: only PC users with Internet Explorer 6 or higher need apply).

Being able to leave a virtual sticky note on a Webpage is kind of pointless unless you can tell people it is there to go and admire. Slinpage joins the most recent band of Web annotation startups, including Diigo and Fleck, that have added sharing and “friendcasting” features to their services. With Slingpage, you can send a Webpage to anyone else in your contact list immediately and even start a chat about it.

Slingpage is an extension for Internet Explorer. (Firefox is coming soon). You can import your contacts from Outllook, Gmail, Facebook, or Yahoo. And, of course, you can also build up your contact list one name at a time. You can only sling Webpages with other people who have also installed the application. The company is working on a Sling-to-email feature to allow the application to spread more virally. And if you Sling a page to a Facebook contact, a message appears in their feed. You can also create a public Slingcast, which is a feed of URLs you collect around a certain topic.

“Every sling becomes a vote, if you will,” says CEO Peter Weinberg, who previously was a technology banker at WIT Soundview (before Schwab acquired it). In that sense, Slingpage is also a little bit like StumbleUpon or del.icio.us. Members save and share URLs, except they do it immediately. When you “sling” a page, a little window pops open in the bottom right of the recipient’s screen. Every page you sling is saved and is a lot easier to find than links you send through e-mail or IM. The startup is based in Estero, Florida and has raised $2.2 million in angel funding. The service will be ad-supported.

I’m still not convinced, though, that it is a better solution than StumbleUpon or del.icio.us for sharing and managing Web pages. The lack of Firefox support means that it is ignoring a group of Web surfers most likely to experiment with new apps. It also needs to develop a widget strategy so that users can distribute their Slingcasts anywhere on the Web, and it needs a better mechanism for Slingcast subscribers to respond with their own notes on a page they want to discuss (something the company is working on).

We got word last night that Diigo will be releasing version 3.0 of its social bookmarking and webpage annotation service today. The company is calling it its biggest upgrade since 2006, when former TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick gushed extravagantly over it.

I’m personally not a daily user of Diigo, even though going back and reading Marshall’s review makes me think I should be. I’ll just have to try v3.0 in full later today. A demonstration video, embedded below, shows an entirely new user interface. We’re also told that the code has been rebuilt and over 100 new features have been added. Social networking has been further developed, too, so you can share your bookmarks with friends and groups more effectively.

Diigo is explicitly pitting itself against Delicious by stating: “in the battle field of social bookmarking 2.0, we believe only delicious and Diigo are still strong players, with Diigo clearly the leader in terms of features and innovations…People who have seen both Diigo 3.0 and delicious 2.0 also think that we are far ahead of delicious 2.0.” Sounds like Diigo’s trying to play David to Yahoo’s Goliath.

Website annotation tool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides feature next week.

The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with full page content including links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues or placed on websites, blogs, and social networks. A bit of good news for publishers: every slide view will actually register a page view for the content owner.

WebSlides also enables Diigo users to highlight important sections and annotate pages on the fly with sticky notes. Users can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders.

To set up a WebSlides presentation, you simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks, add background music or voice narration, and click “Play”.

There is a lot of competition in the website annotation space, but Diigo’s WebSlides is the first slideshow widget to preserve total page content. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities, WebSlides makes for a great product. The company will be presenting in the TechCrunch40 demo pit next week.

Our previous coverage of Diigo is here.

In 1999, Eng-Sion Tan and two friends launched Third Voice, a browser plugin that would let anyone make annotations on webpages. The intent was to encourage freer speech on the internet, but many slammed it as “Web Graffiti.” The company eventually shut down.

The idea of web page annotation didn’t die with Third Voice, though. New services, each with unique features, have carried on.

Diigo

A must have for researchers
Diigo is a research tool that lets you share bookmarks and annotations on web pages using a browser plugin or bookmarklet. Notes are anchored to highlighted text and bookmarks save a cached copy of the site. Diigo will also let you save to multiple other bookmarking services (all the big ones) and email your annotated pages to friends who don’t have the plugin. We covered Diigo earlier.

Diigo has some advanced search functionality built in as well. With Diigo, you can search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines, social bookmarking systems, on blogs, within the current site, amongst inbound links, and seven different content verticals (TV, stock sites, etc.). Diigo also lets you post links to your blog through posts, or a “linkroll” widget listing your most recent annotations.

Fleck

Bare bones
Fleck is the most basic of the annotation services, letting you simply post public or private text notes on a page. Notes can be posted by using a browser plugin or by ajax when Fleck feeds web pages through its servers and adds the necessary annotation code. Permalinks to annotated pages can be emailed to friends and posted to blogs. We covered their launch previously and expect the company to be rolling out more features.

ShiftSpace

Have your way with any webpage
ShiftSpace is an opensource browser plugin (FF only) being developed by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program and is pretty close to internet graffiti. The plugin allows their users to annotate and remix a website saving it as a communally editable alternate version revealed in your browser by pressing Shift + Space. ShiftSpace allows users to leave notes, highlight text, change images, and edit the page source. It kind of reminds me of the web page analysis plugin Firebug, which allows you to carry out live edits of any web page. For web surfers with the plugin, modified pages are marked with a small ShiftSpace icon (§) in the bottom left side of the screen.

Modified pages are called “shifts”, and if made public, are shared on the ShiftSpace website. Users can subscribe to the shifts of users they like via RSS. The ShiftSpace team also plans to implement “trails”, which are hyperlinked collections of related shifts.

Stickis

Subscribe to only the annotations you want
Stickis is a web page annotation service that lets you subscribe to content “channels” from your friends and the community via a browser plugin. We previously covered their launch. You can also view notes without the plugin when they are served by proxy through Stickis’ website. Channels can consist of text and image sticky notes, RSS feeds (blogs), and even specialized data channels for web services such as OpenTable or Yelp. Every note you make is also stored on your personal Stickis blog, which leaves a trackback to itself if you annotate a blog.

When you subscribe to a channel, it stays with you while surfing the web in a collapsible sidebar, suggesting content based on what page you’re on. Specialized channels, like OpenTable or Yelp, pop up reservation options and restaurant reviews when you visit a page linking to a restaurant. Other content channels populate the tray with notes based on an analysis of a the URL and the note’s tags. When you click on a note, it brings up the notes on the page along with comments on the note made by your friends.

Stickis parent company, Activeweave, also recently announced BlogRovR, a simpler version of Stickis that feeds you blog content from your favorite bloggers as you search surf the web.

Trailfire

Create and share tours of the web
We covered Trailfire’s launch last August. Since then, the social website annotation service has developed considerably, recently announcing some more of the social features it originally promised.

Trailfire is an IE and Firefox plugin that lets you post notes (called marks) right on top of a webpage and string them together with hyperlinks (making “trails”). The plugin consists of a note button for leaving marks and a sidebar for managing your trails. When you arrive at a page you’re interested in marking up, you click the mark button, which pops up a little ajax balloon with a text editor inside that you can position anywhere on the page. In the editor, you can compose a message out of text, images, and hyperlinks. You then title the mark and select which trail (group of notes) it belongs to. Trails can be posted public or private and commented on. When a trail is posted, you follow it by just clicking next.

The new version of the service will now include the ability to make friends and share with them, follow all the trails made by a user, gather your friends into groups, and allow trails to be edited together by multiple users (wiki trails).

Compared with other annotation services, Trailfire has expanded in what I find to be a more effective way. Unlike services like Diigo, and Stickis, Trailfire has really helped its exposure by not requiring a sign-in or download to see annotations unlike Stickis and Diigo (to see notes). Fleck matches this simplicity. For people without the plugin, Trailfire serves the annotated sites through its servers, embedding ajax notes within the page. Trailfire will now also let you add notes to a page through their proxy by a newly released bookmarklet.

Secondly, Trailfire has implemented personal trail pages that consists of a numbered list of each of the links in the trail along with a thumbnail of the website. This has enabled search engines to index their pages and generate a fair amount of organic traffic. One such example was an April fools trail on the site, which received over 168,000 uniques on April 1st, due in large part to search engine traffic.

I just looked at the new research megatool Diigo and though several bloggers have covered it in the past and in previous incarnations (including our charming leader) I think they really missed the boat when many called it an unexciting entry into the crowded social bookmarking space. This is a web based knowledge worker’s dream come true, it’s the kind of thing that makes me love web apps.

The Reno, Nevada based company’s name is an acronym for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.” It does offer a browser bookmarklet, but you’ll want to grab the Firefox or IE toolbar to use the best Diigo has to offer.

In addition to nailing the basics in social bookmarking, there are many features here that give this system huge value whether or not it ever builds a network effect from a large number of users.
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Diigo, which stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”, is a social bookmarking site that allows users to highlight multiple content areas, including pictures, tag the page, and bookmark it. Users can also add sticky notes to a highlighted text area. It has other good features as well – see the flash demo for a good overview.

Many of the bookmarking sites are starting to blur together for me. I like Diigo and the founders are politely efficient in getting the word out. The company has also executed well and released a polished product. But at the end of the day I’m not sure how many social bookmarking sites can make the cut.

I will say this, though. I like the idea of public and private “sticky” notes on a website (Activeweave promises this, and I saw a really great demo two months ago, but it hasn’t launched yet). And I also like the ability to highlight multiple areas of a website in my bookmarks (Kaboodle does a great job of this).

But, as you can see, for just about every feature, there are multiple companies already attacking the space with vigor. Good luck to all. It’s going to be a long, hard fight. With perhaps as much as a $30 million payout at the end of the day.