The Industry Standard - WebNotes launches online annotation service amid heavy competition - Comments

Hey Justin and Wade, As

Marc A. Meyer — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:46:53 -0800

Hey Justin and Wade,

As co-founder of Activeweave, maker of Stickis, I welcome a new entrant into the web annotation sphere. I share with Wade, who's product is fabulous, and who I agree ought not to be lumped into the same bucket of social web annotation, an ongoing surprise that the market hasn't arisen for the ability to share a user-oriented custom-web layer with friends.

When Jean Sini and I started Activeweave in 2005, it seemed evident to us, and inspirational to our investors like Esther Dyson, that the vision was compelling and could bring about a new level of cooperation and sharing on the web. Stickis, as the graph Justin points out attests, never really took off, though we worked hard to put in all sorts of features that we thought people would absolutely need. Certainly there were technical and strategic things we could have done better, but the lack of traction of the idea of sharing the web directly, in my mind, comes down to there not being a simple pre-existing and established metaphor for the behavior of annotating and sharing widely. In other words, there needs to be a simple use case to appeal to folks--how and why do I use this. Bookmarking isn't really primarily a sharing activity, in my opinion (delicious notwithstanding). Blogging and collecting is, but doing so in a distributed fashion (Trailfire, fleck, and myriad others along the way) is a real inversion of the ordinary way folks think about sharing.

One of the earliest example use cases we played with for Stickis was the ability to create channels of alternative shopping sources, by layering them on existing "catalogs" like Amazon. A mashup like the stillborn in infancy piratesoftheamazon, would be an instance of that sort of thing.

The space is still, I think, incredibly promising, and I hope someone will get it right soon. Activeweave was purchased by BuzzLogic, so we're out of that running. Entertainingly, during the last year of our independent operation, when Stickis wasn't taking off as we wished, we looked at what we could do with the technology and create something out of it which was simple, using 10% of what we'd built for Stickis, cutting all the pieces that we loved but weren't being used much by our user base. In a resounding triumph of less is more, BlogRovR was launched, and for real grins, check out our growth there http://siteanalytics.compete.com/diigo.com+blogrovr.com+stickis.com/?met...

Best wishes for success to both Diigo and WebNotes. Keep on scribbling!
Marc Meyer
ex-CEO, Activeweave
SVP Products, BuzzLogic

Justin, You are right that

Wade — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:27:47 -0800

Justin,

You are right that web annotation sector has been struggling. Given the clear usefulness and importance of web annotation in enabling better research productivity, better information sharing and dialogue, this has certainly been somewhat perplexing to all players in this space.

While other players are reportedly close to being "deadpooled", or already shut-down, Diigo seems to be the only one gaining some traction and growing, albeit not explosively. So I really wish we do not get lumped together with these other guys :) . Oh, well .. .

See http://siteanalytics.compete.com/diigo.com+fleck.com+stickis.com/?metric....

We will be pushing out a lot of improvements soon and are determined to make web annotation an eventual success.

Wade, CEO, Diigo

WebNotes launches online annotation service amid heavy competition

Venture Beat — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:01:00 -0800

Yet another web annotation service is launching today. WebNotes is releasing virtual highlighting and sticky-note tools designed to help people track and annotate online content. The tools let users highlight text on, or stick notes to, web pages. They also let users organize their annotations into files and share those files with others via email or PDF.

But the Cambridge, Mass. company is entering a crowded playing field, and not a particularly healthy one at that. The concept of an annotated web is a good one, because it allows people to better organize and share personalized views of web content. But the web annotation sector has struggled. The first major companies in this space date back to the web 1.0 era, including Third Voice, a startup that buckled in the middle of the dot-com crash in April 2001.

Since then a plethora of other players have emerged including Faves, Diigo, Fleck, ReframeIT and Stickis among many others. All of the companies in the web annotation space have similar business models — frequently they offer a free version geared toward mainstream users and a premium version aimed at enterprise users.

WebNotes seems to be banking on the same business model. According to chief executive Ryan Damico, the company will offer a mainstream-oriented free version of WebNotes, but its core product will be the paid premium version. When I asked how the company plans to differentiate itself from competitors, Damico said it would offer features different from any of its competitors, but he declined to specify what those features would be or when the premium version would be released. He did say in an email that “development will take us a little while” — but I do think the premium version is WebNotes’ only chance to build a profitable business.

Damico said that most web annotation companies are focused on building large communities, with the ultimate goal of being acquired. So far this strategy has largely failed — although Clipmarks was bought by Forbes last year — because annotation startups have found it tough to build communities among such established competitors as social bookmarking platforms Delicious, Digg and Reddit. Delicious, now owned by Yahoo, already provides a platform for storing web page links and attracts a lot of users, as does Facebook, which provides a Sticky Notes application.

Admittedly, many of the social bookmarking platforms compete with web annotation-focused companies only indirectly, but by providing enough related functionality to the mainstream user they often whisk away potential clients.

Even if you disregard the social bookmarking players for a moment, the competition isn’t easy. Direct competitors such as Diigo and Faves boast a few hundred thousand monthly uniques and offer accounts specific to enterprise users. Diigo offers Educator Accounts aimed at academia. Fleck is launching business- and education-specific accounts in the near future as well.

So, I hate to say it, but I don’t see how WebNotes can become a profitable success. You can try it yourself though–300 beta invites are available for VentureBeat readers.

Damico says the idea for WebNotes came from his frustration with web research while a computer science student at the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology (MIT). Originally more of a side project than a startup, Damico and his team of five other MIT alumni secured private funding of an undisclosed amount earlier this year and are now working on the service full-time.