Hot on the trail…
August 17th, 2006 by marc
Mike Arrington at Techcrunch announced the launch of Trailfire yesterday. I’d heard a general description of them a few months ago from Kimbal Musk, of GetMedium and The Kitchen fame. They’re the closest thing to Stickis currently on the market, which is great if only because now VC’s I talk to are going to stop asking how Stickis is different from Diigo, and asking a more difficult but more interesting question.
John Cook has also posted a blurb on them.
I’m going to resist the temptation before we launch to try to define the differences between Tralfire and Stickis, but let me applaud their efforts and ideas and offer some general thoughts.
The ability to see at a glance what those you care about have to say about what you’re browsing is the seed of a great idea.
The hard and exciting part in this sort of thing is not just to deliver the world’s ramblings to a user’s browser page, as Third Voice did, but to deliver only their community to it, and do so in a personalized, controllable, unobtrusive and scaleable way. In essence this is a vertical, socially-segmented search on every web page access.
Third voice and similar notions didn’t meet the goal of organizing the clutter” but just added to it. The new generation of tools following in their footsteps need to pay attention to how to do this if we’re to fulfill the potential of the next-wave, social web.
As an aside, the term “social bookmarking” is very unfortunate. Diigo’s term “social annotation” is far better, as it gives a sense of the community adding information to wherever it is relevant on the web. This is the start of breaking the “portal”, destination-centric paradigm that has dominated the web.
Marc,
Thanks for the comments. I have been a Stikis and Diigo user for some time and also applaud your innovations. I also use del.icio.us and more recently Bluedot. It is true that we are all trying to solve similar problems and I think it would be silly to argue about what feature is better and which is worse. Customers will make the telling choice about all that.
In the meantime you bring up a great subject. What are each of us trying to build? Is there a bigger idea here than social bookmarking or social annotation? Now anyone with a browser can contribute content or point of view to any page and can link them up into mini-webs. These, looked at as a whole, become what we call the Social Web (http://occamsmachete.com/2006/08/the_social_web.html). I don’t know about you but the idea of a user generated meta-web where users have rewired and remixed things to their own point of view is pretty exciting to me.
But I think you are dead on about the key being in the execution.
Pat