Two Irish brothers Peter and Tom Kehoe are the people behind a new Irish technology startup, YayTrail. Below is an excerpt of some of the more popular questions that have been recently asked of them.
Why did you start YayTrail? What made you think about doing this?
Peter & Tom: For years now we’ve been exploring the idea of publishing on the web. It's been pretty amazing watching how the Internet is turning more and more people into active contributors of media. We think it's still more difficult than it should be to get involved, though. It's not as easy as it could be for a lot of people to just chip in and shape the media round them, and to share their voice with likeminded friends and beyond.
For most people still, the web is quite a passive experience. They browse to a site, read an article, click through to another article, rinse and repeat. The means for users to express themselves here are quite limited - if they want to share a point of view they'll create yet another user account that they'll likely promptly forget about, and add their say to a sea of strangers' comments tucked away somewhere relatively few people look. It's a lot of hassle for a net result that is of relatively limited value. There's a lot of hoops to jump through on each site before you actually get to have your say - and you're usually told to go into the corner to say it. A smaller number still are motivated to create their own space on the web outside of other website - like a blog or a Twitter feed. A large number of those end up abandoning their efforts as producers of content however. Put into their own context it seems a lot of people tend to draw a blank.
We got to thinking there was an opportunity to use the increasing power and flexibility of browsers to enable many more people to have their say, with a simple platform for content creation and sharing that's built across all webpages, and that connects groups of friends and peers directly rather than through the webpages themselves. We figured it should be as easy and spontaneous as just clicking and typing, as if the page were, for example, a word document. With no password walls to climb over on different sites, and with an easy means to find friends' content - with easy means for your content and your friends' content to stand out from that 'sea of strangers'. We wanted to do this without any "bad bits" like large sidebars and obstructive content layers hovering over webpages and so on. After some tinkering we realised that browser technology today allows us to do all this, so we figured, why not?
What makes this different compared to existing browser plugins? Who are your competitors?
Tom: We believe that our product is the first of its kind, as a cross-website content creation tool that is truly in-line.
What do you mean by 'in-line'?
Peter: By this we mean content that is actually part of the page. Consider typing into a word document - when you add content to a document there you are adding it inline. Existing content in the document moves around, if necessary, to accomodate the new content. When you write an email, as you edit the body of the email, you're also editing it in-line. But if for example you attach a document to the email, that document's content isn't in-line with the email - it lives outside of the email body itself.
We've had cross-website content creation tools that live in web browsers before - like Diigo, Google Sidewiki more recently, and more. But to date these kinds of tools have confined the user's content to large sidebars in the user's browser or to layers living on top of the original webpage - in the latter case, layers that often obscure the original webpage's content. From the user's perspective, the content isn't actually a part of the page. If you like, the content has been 'attached' to the page like an email attachment via sidebars and extra content layers.
YayTrail allows the user's content to exist as a first class element of the page - as something that lives in the page itself, in the structure and flow of the original webpage, right alongside the original page content. It elevates the status of the user's content to a level second to none. The user effectively has the same status as the original creator of the page.
This has a lot of desirable side-effects for the user experience - unlike our competitors we don't need big sidebars taking up space in your browser, we don't need to put content on a layer on top of the page. Our interface is simply a blinking cursor on the page, the same simple interface that people are used to with regular word processing programs. We believe that by removing the heavier visual elements and complexities associated with our competitors such as sidebars and extra content layers we can lower barriers and appeal to a much broader audience of users. The typical audience for services like Diigo has been researchers and techie folks, which we think is a consequence of the type of trade off and complication of the user interface that's required by these services. Remove that tradeoff and I think we can reach new types of user, and faciliate more casual and spontaneous usage.
When you use YayTrail on a page are you actually changing the original webpage?
Tom: No, it is important to understand that using YayTrail enables the user to change their "view" of the webpage and allow others that use YayTrail to see this view. The actual webpage on the server remains unchanged and people who are not using YayTrail and who are not subscribed to you on YayTrail will not see your changes. Using an analogy, you could think of it as putting on a pair of glasses that changes your view of the webpage – that is, it's a view that is individual to you. These changes are made on your end, inside your web browser. The idea of your view of the web being a personal one is something that probably doesn't seem familiar to many people. We're used to the notion of the web being an entirely shared, universally consistent thing. But I think you'll see a growing trend of the personalisation of the web - YayTrail is one such tool which allows you to personalise your web with your friends.
Can you mute people? How do you stop people spamming webpages with unwanted content?
Tom: YayTrail uses a model where users subscribe to “follow” other users. Until you have subscribed to YayTrail to follow a user you will not see their changes to any webpages. You can at any time unsubscribe from another user to stop seeing their changes, therefore you will not see spam unless you subscribe to follow a user that sends spam. The YayTrail model offers you total control over whose content you see and whose content you do not wish to see. So you can follow your friends and other people of interest and forget the rest.
How will you make money?
Tom: YayTrail is free to register for all users. Being a commercial entity is one of our core principles and our goal and responsibility is to operate YayTrail in a manner that is both sustainable and profitable. In this early stage we are evaluating many possible revenue opportunities including specialist account types for commercial enterprises that are interested in marketing and branded messaging, direct advertising, and licensing product models.
What are the benefits and disadvantages of giving the user this level of control?
Peter: YayTrail gives the user a large degree of control and quite a lot of power in how and where they can express themselves. As we said before, with YayTrail the user is now virtually on the same level as a page's original creator. This type of control can obviously be abused. For example, a user may make an inappropriate contribution in the context of a page with a serious subject matter or may use it to try and spread inaccurate information. On the other hand, we think this level of control gives most users a positive power to express themselves and communicate in the context of the media around them in a simple and fairly unprecedented way.
We strongly believe that once you offer the web user more control they will use it - the corner cases of people abusing that control shouldn't prevent the user in general from enjoying that kind of freedom. The Internet is all about giving the user control; YayTrail gives users power to both to create with unprecedented levels of control, and to filter that content which they see so they can kick out undesirable elements from their sphere of influence. The Internet has disrupted so many fields through handing ever more control to the user - this approach has always won out. We think, in a way, it's about time the web disrupted itself in regards to how users can create and share content on the web, and in the status and prominence given to that content. For a long time many have viewed the web as a network of webpages, and the people behind those webpages. We believe this ignores the potential role of the browsers connecting to these webpages, and the people behind those browsers - i.e. the vast majority of particpants on the web. Our vision of the web is for the user and the browser to be as important on the web as that user’s peers wish it to be. As browser technology has evolved, it is now possible to make this happen.
What’s the difference between YayTrail and blogging?
Peter: This is probably a case of semantics. Blogging as a term is really a fairly abstract concept, from which we've seen an evolving range of manifestations - the original 'blog' as popularised by Blogger and others, microblogging as per Twitter and so on. The type of content creation YayTrail enables could be considered as under the umbrella term of blogging - perhaps it can be considered as in-context or 'in-page' blogging.
What type of feedback have you been getting so far?
Tom: YayTrail is still in a preview phase so lots of things still need to mature and we've many, many ideas and improvements that we've yet to implement, but user feedback to date has been excellent. We’ve learned a lot about the need to simplify our approach – this concept is a new one to most users and so it’s interesting to experiment with the various ways to enable users to better understand the concept. We’ve started recently soliciting feedback within media and industry circles and we’re seeing quite a bit of excitement and intrigue about the project.
Why the name, YayTrail?
Peter: I'd been reading a book, "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis, and the author said something along the lines of brands and people now 'being' the trail of content they leave behind them on the web. The idea that 'you' are increasingly represented by the trail of content and interactions you create on the web. That struck a chord, we thought this related closely to what we were doing - allowing people an easy way to create little nuggets of content across the web - so we decided to contract the notion of 'you are your trail' to 'YayTrail'. It rhymes in a certain way, it's reasonably short, so we think it'll do...
Monday, December 28, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Our first video! What is YayTrail?
We're delighted to present our first video clip, explaining what YayTrail is and how it helps you create a personal web. Check it out below, and let us know what you think!
Credits to Marc Smith at The Cuillin Collective for the production. Enormous thanks also to Christine Sherwood for the voiceover - you can find her on her YayTrail page or at TheSweetItalian. Thanks Christine!
Credits to Marc Smith at The Cuillin Collective for the production. Enormous thanks also to Christine Sherwood for the voiceover - you can find her on her YayTrail page or at TheSweetItalian. Thanks Christine!
...
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Saturday, December 12, 2009
An aside: The changing media landscape - Moving to a more open web
The media landscape is rapidly changing. A long long time ago, mass media communication involved a small number of large media companies communicating with large proportions of the available audience. Media consumption was an almost universally shared experience - everyone read the same few newspapers, watched the same few television programmes and went to see the same few movies at the cinema. Then cable television came along and suddenly hundreds of television channels were available to all. While mass 'hits' still existed (e.g. "Star Wars", "Titanic"), the media landscape became more fractured as more people watched and read more different things.
With the Internet, both media consumption and creation have fractured to an unprecedented degree. To borrow an analogy from Charles Leadbeater (author of We-Think), "if the media landscape is a beach, where once there were just a few large boulders of rock, now there are a million tiny pebbles scattered along the shore". These new 'pebbles' of media are largely created by the audience rather than professional media organisations, enabled by a slew of web technologies that invite anyone and everyone to create content ranging from blogs to videos to reviews to comments, to simple status updates. More and more, people are being defined online by the trail of 'pebbles' they leave behind them.
More recently, social networking services have emerged enabling more web users to start to congregate around their friends, and to look to their friends for content and links to interesting content, creating a more personal kind of web experience. People have started to cast off the anonymity borne from the early days of the web and to bring online their real identities, communicating and sharing their web experience with their friends and peers.
The web, however, is still largely wired according to a time when people congregated with strangers and behind multiple anonymous identities. The answer to this has been the emergence of the concept of an "open web". Here, it is proposed that websites start to adopt certain technologies that 'open up' their website to integration with existing social network services such that users on that website can easily share activities therein with their peers through a given social networking service. In an ideal manifestation of this vision, a set of standard technologies would be adopted by all web sites and services, enabling one to take their friends with them around the web, to see their friends content easily as they browse, staying connected to them and their thoughts from site to site.
Today's online shopping, for example, means visiting Amazon.com, reading reviews from strangers and conducting a transaction. In a vision of an open web, this Amazon page would find out who my friends are, find out if they have reviewed the product I'm buying, and show me my friends reviews first and foremost. Moreover, it might find content from other sites relating to this product that has been created by my friends, and pull this into the page (e.g. a review by a friend on the Barnes & Noble online store for the same product). Much more powerful (and interesting) than the recommendation of strangers is the recommendation of real people and friends you know. In another example, when you visit a blog you are typically presented with page after page of comments. Information over-load, in other words. In an open web world, it should be possible to quickly and easily jump to comments made by people you care about. In other words, the collective intelligence/brain of your friends and peers can follow you and be at your disposal anywhere on the web, in a standard, universal way.
Today this is to a large extent a pipedream. Through APIs available on services like Facebook, some sites like YouTube have automatic sharing of videos uploaded and comments made with friends on that service. Some blogs have adopted specialised systems like Disqus that allow a person to carry a single identity to each adopting blog, and to track comments made by friends. In other words, current efforts toward a more open web are in their infancy and are fractured. There is only sporadic adoption of integration with existing social networking services, and what adoption is there is spread across different services.
There is an opportunity to realise and deliver the future of social networking. The future of social networking is not in centralisation, but is cross-site, universal and distributed. It is in the creation of a web that is personal to each of us. That is, it is in a tool that allows people to establish their presence on any webpage - that gives users unprecedented control to edit and modify the web around them to reflect their thoughts, ideas and opinions, and to share this 'in-context presence" with their friends. Such a tool will turn every webpage into a social space that disrupts traditional communication between marketer and consumer, website and visitor.
YayTrail aims to be such a tool. We believe that it is possible to facilitate a user to create content on any website using one identity and to share this with friends. This will make the web more open to user generated content in more advanced ways than ever before.
Using Yaytrail, any webpage becomes an open and social space where you and your friends can add knowledge, opinions, ideas and insights, providing a definitive and personalised web experience that is created and edited by your peers. Yaytrail is very simple and casual-friendly to use. The editing interface is very natural for anyone used to normal word processing, and allows easy spontaneous participation in any webpage. Our system allows for content creation in line and in the structure of the page - not as overlaid sticky-notes or other layers that can obstruct and make a mess of the structure of a page, and that look out of place. We don't employ any sidebar that consumes screen real estate in the user's browsers, nor do we add anything to the browser chrome. It's a very simple, visually lightweight system that allows the creation of content in a way that is direct and makes sense in a given page. Yaytrail aggregates the trail of content created by you and your friends to help you discover new and interesting webpages and content, putting you in touch with what's hot right now on the web among your friends.
The future
Social networking is here to stay. Social networking is the future of the web, constantly developing and taking on new qualities. We believe YayTrail offers a new set of qualities in this field, cracking open the webpage to direct and in-line user enhancement. By doing so, and by allowing users to share this content among each other, we believe we are giving web users a much finer level of control in content creation and communication online. We hope you will share in this journey with us.
The YayTrail team
With the Internet, both media consumption and creation have fractured to an unprecedented degree. To borrow an analogy from Charles Leadbeater (author of We-Think), "if the media landscape is a beach, where once there were just a few large boulders of rock, now there are a million tiny pebbles scattered along the shore". These new 'pebbles' of media are largely created by the audience rather than professional media organisations, enabled by a slew of web technologies that invite anyone and everyone to create content ranging from blogs to videos to reviews to comments, to simple status updates. More and more, people are being defined online by the trail of 'pebbles' they leave behind them.
More recently, social networking services have emerged enabling more web users to start to congregate around their friends, and to look to their friends for content and links to interesting content, creating a more personal kind of web experience. People have started to cast off the anonymity borne from the early days of the web and to bring online their real identities, communicating and sharing their web experience with their friends and peers.
The web, however, is still largely wired according to a time when people congregated with strangers and behind multiple anonymous identities. The answer to this has been the emergence of the concept of an "open web". Here, it is proposed that websites start to adopt certain technologies that 'open up' their website to integration with existing social network services such that users on that website can easily share activities therein with their peers through a given social networking service. In an ideal manifestation of this vision, a set of standard technologies would be adopted by all web sites and services, enabling one to take their friends with them around the web, to see their friends content easily as they browse, staying connected to them and their thoughts from site to site.
Today's online shopping, for example, means visiting Amazon.com, reading reviews from strangers and conducting a transaction. In a vision of an open web, this Amazon page would find out who my friends are, find out if they have reviewed the product I'm buying, and show me my friends reviews first and foremost. Moreover, it might find content from other sites relating to this product that has been created by my friends, and pull this into the page (e.g. a review by a friend on the Barnes & Noble online store for the same product). Much more powerful (and interesting) than the recommendation of strangers is the recommendation of real people and friends you know. In another example, when you visit a blog you are typically presented with page after page of comments. Information over-load, in other words. In an open web world, it should be possible to quickly and easily jump to comments made by people you care about. In other words, the collective intelligence/brain of your friends and peers can follow you and be at your disposal anywhere on the web, in a standard, universal way.
Today this is to a large extent a pipedream. Through APIs available on services like Facebook, some sites like YouTube have automatic sharing of videos uploaded and comments made with friends on that service. Some blogs have adopted specialised systems like Disqus that allow a person to carry a single identity to each adopting blog, and to track comments made by friends. In other words, current efforts toward a more open web are in their infancy and are fractured. There is only sporadic adoption of integration with existing social networking services, and what adoption is there is spread across different services.
There is an opportunity to realise and deliver the future of social networking. The future of social networking is not in centralisation, but is cross-site, universal and distributed. It is in the creation of a web that is personal to each of us. That is, it is in a tool that allows people to establish their presence on any webpage - that gives users unprecedented control to edit and modify the web around them to reflect their thoughts, ideas and opinions, and to share this 'in-context presence" with their friends. Such a tool will turn every webpage into a social space that disrupts traditional communication between marketer and consumer, website and visitor.
YayTrail aims to be such a tool. We believe that it is possible to facilitate a user to create content on any website using one identity and to share this with friends. This will make the web more open to user generated content in more advanced ways than ever before.
Using Yaytrail, any webpage becomes an open and social space where you and your friends can add knowledge, opinions, ideas and insights, providing a definitive and personalised web experience that is created and edited by your peers. Yaytrail is very simple and casual-friendly to use. The editing interface is very natural for anyone used to normal word processing, and allows easy spontaneous participation in any webpage. Our system allows for content creation in line and in the structure of the page - not as overlaid sticky-notes or other layers that can obstruct and make a mess of the structure of a page, and that look out of place. We don't employ any sidebar that consumes screen real estate in the user's browsers, nor do we add anything to the browser chrome. It's a very simple, visually lightweight system that allows the creation of content in a way that is direct and makes sense in a given page. Yaytrail aggregates the trail of content created by you and your friends to help you discover new and interesting webpages and content, putting you in touch with what's hot right now on the web among your friends.
The future
Social networking is here to stay. Social networking is the future of the web, constantly developing and taking on new qualities. We believe YayTrail offers a new set of qualities in this field, cracking open the webpage to direct and in-line user enhancement. By doing so, and by allowing users to share this content among each other, we believe we are giving web users a much finer level of control in content creation and communication online. We hope you will share in this journey with us.
The YayTrail team
...
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Thursday, December 10, 2009
Development Update - Following Friends, Avatars, Colours & more
As promised, we’re happy to share the latest changes we've been working on to improve YayTrail.
So what's new?
Find and Follow your friends
This big update allows you to choose whose trails you wish to follow. Previously all users were subscribed to follow everyone else, and that was reflected in your inbox, where everyone's activity was recorded for every other user to see.
Now you can pick and choose who to follow, customising your inbox to reflect only the people you are interested in a big step toward the goal of helping you create a more personal web.
Your inbox now shows on the right hand side who you are following and who is following you. You can browse for more people to follow by clicking on the “Find people” link in the top right corner of the page. You'll be brought to a directory of users registered on YayTrail - click on one of the entries to go to that user's trail page.
Every user's trail page now has a button labelled 'Follow'. Clicking this will subscribe you to follow that user. Once you are subscribed to this user the button will change to 'Stop Following'. As the name implies, clicking this will unsubcribe you from this user's trail.
Every trail page now also shows who the user is following and who is following them - another way to find more users you might be interested in.
This is just the first draft of our friend-following model. Going forward we will have many more 'people management' tools and privacy options. Keep an eye out!
Some more colour
We’ve listened to what you have had to say and by popular demand we have introduced just a little more colour into your life! Every user can now customise the colour associated with their YayTrail edits through the settings page. Just click another colour and hit 'Submit Change', and all your edits will be painted in your new chosen hue.
Photo
You can further customise your presence on YayTrail and across your edits by uploading a photo or image that represents you. Just click on the Settings and use the Photo form to upload and crop your favourite image. This will then become your identity badge, so big nice smiling faces please!
Design
We're tinkering with the design as you'll probably see as you move around the site. Some pages aren't in perfect visual harmony yet. Please bear with us as we experiment with design treatments that we hope will make for a more pleasant experience.
Work in Progress
As always, this update represents a work in progress. We need your help to test and refine YayTrail as we continue to preview the service. Undoubtedly there are bugs to be found and fixed with this updated code and the new changes, so please do give YayTrail a whirl and let us know what you think. We strongly encourage you to invite your friends too - the more people you know on YayTrail, the more enjoyable it is!
If you need any help at all in using the service, don't be shy about letting us know, no matter the problem. Any questions, comments, bugs and feedback are welcome at feedback@yaytrail.com or you can just drop us a comment on this blog below or better still, an edit with Yaytrail.
So what's new?
Find and Follow your friends
This big update allows you to choose whose trails you wish to follow. Previously all users were subscribed to follow everyone else, and that was reflected in your inbox, where everyone's activity was recorded for every other user to see.
Now you can pick and choose who to follow, customising your inbox to reflect only the people you are interested in a big step toward the goal of helping you create a more personal web.
Your inbox now shows on the right hand side who you are following and who is following you. You can browse for more people to follow by clicking on the “Find people” link in the top right corner of the page. You'll be brought to a directory of users registered on YayTrail - click on one of the entries to go to that user's trail page.
Every user's trail page now has a button labelled 'Follow'. Clicking this will subscribe you to follow that user. Once you are subscribed to this user the button will change to 'Stop Following'. As the name implies, clicking this will unsubcribe you from this user's trail.
Every trail page now also shows who the user is following and who is following them - another way to find more users you might be interested in.
This is just the first draft of our friend-following model. Going forward we will have many more 'people management' tools and privacy options. Keep an eye out!
Some more colour
We’ve listened to what you have had to say and by popular demand we have introduced just a little more colour into your life! Every user can now customise the colour associated with their YayTrail edits through the settings page. Just click another colour and hit 'Submit Change', and all your edits will be painted in your new chosen hue.
Photo
You can further customise your presence on YayTrail and across your edits by uploading a photo or image that represents you. Just click on the Settings and use the Photo form to upload and crop your favourite image. This will then become your identity badge, so big nice smiling faces please!
Design
We're tinkering with the design as you'll probably see as you move around the site. Some pages aren't in perfect visual harmony yet. Please bear with us as we experiment with design treatments that we hope will make for a more pleasant experience.
Work in Progress
As always, this update represents a work in progress. We need your help to test and refine YayTrail as we continue to preview the service. Undoubtedly there are bugs to be found and fixed with this updated code and the new changes, so please do give YayTrail a whirl and let us know what you think. We strongly encourage you to invite your friends too - the more people you know on YayTrail, the more enjoyable it is!
If you need any help at all in using the service, don't be shy about letting us know, no matter the problem. Any questions, comments, bugs and feedback are welcome at feedback@yaytrail.com or you can just drop us a comment on this blog below or better still, an edit with Yaytrail.
...
Continue Reading
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