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... (Read more)
Reprinted with permission from VentureBeat. Story copyright 2008 VentureBeat Inc. All rights reserved.
Comments
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
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
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