YayTrail - a new kind of web annotation service, how it's different to previous services and how it can change the web user experience!

With January traditionally being the month where people throw out some wild predictions, allow me also to make one; in the very near future we will be able to write inside any webpage! I can almost hear the cries of derision ... "madness, never going to happen, content owners would never allow for it", while others will say, "we've seen it all before, this is old news, didn't Third Voice do this 10 years ago"?

Well as it so happens Third Voice did allow for web-annotation ten years ago and we salute them as pioneers in doing so. We've seen many derivatives of Third Voice try to capitalise on this idea too; in particular we tip our hat to the efforts of Diigo, and more recently Google SideWiki and Re-frame it (the subject of significant Silicon valley funding over the past 6 months). However any service we've discovered to date that allows you to create content on any page in a universal way has enabled this by using invasive sidebars and/or layers of user content that live on top of the web-page, often obscuring the content of the original page. Significant portions of the browser real estate are taken over by these tools.

In our opinion we think this kind of obstruction on the user's interface is the reason why these services have typically focused on a very specific kind of web user - e.g. the research industry and academia. These web annotation services have not seen much traction among the more casual market of web-users (of which there are hundreds of millions) which we think is largely down to the clunkiness and interface complexities; a user that works with these services needs to have a certain technical awareness not to mention tolerance. The trade-offs in the browsing experience has completely overwhelmed the value these services can offer for large numbers of people.

It is frustration with these services, and the disconnect between the potential value of this idea and its implementations to date, that drives the development of YayTrail. We thought, wouldn't it be cool when you are browsing the web if you could just click and type on any page like it was an editable document, where any input you make can be a seamless part of the original page? Where you can become an editor of your own web? Without having to decipher the various bubbles, and "post-it" comments that were all over the screen or taking up valuable space on top of or in the margin of your screen?

We believe YayTrail is the first web service to provide this level of true in-line user enrichment of webpages. We feel that the technology provided by YayTrail will have a much better chance of attracting a more general audience of web users, by realising the value of the vision of a personal web without the technical and user-interface baggage carried by previous annotation services. The YayTrail concept can enable that "open-web" vision where you can connect to your friends in a universal way across any web site and have their collective intelligence follow you around the web. This is the idea that we are striving for, that of a web that becomes more personal to each individual user. Where the web becomes your "view" of the web; your personal view of the web made by you and your peers, almost like a distributed social network, where you and your friends can express yourselves as powerfully as any webpage creator.

We believe this cross-website, universal content creation platform needs to be a lot simpler than what we have to date, but simplicity is just one part of the equation. Services like Twitter are so so simple and spontaneous, yet they have the weakness of being completely out of context. As with blogs before them, a lot of users end up abandoning Twitter accounts as active participants because creatively it's like a blank piece of paper. In our opinion it is far more difficult to create content out-of-context - when you put people in their own context, many of them have difficulty finding their voice. Context is good, and we want to make the whole web a context for your voice. But the services we've seen to date that offer this kind of in-context user expression have stumbled severely on the simplicity issue.

We think the first step toward addressing that (and a pretty big one) is to remove all the visual and UI bloat, and allow for in-line editing of web-pages! Yes, we are repeating ourselves and shamelessly so! We think doing this brings a wide array of benefits. It's much simpler, and it's much more spontaneous. Click, type, and click again to save, how cool would that be? We believe that this type of editing is far more intuitive and gives far greater value to the user's content than when it's part of a non-native content layer or on the side of a web-page. It's visually far more seamless and lightweight to boot.

To quote some of our early beta testers; Cheeky Christine " Think about it-my mother is looking for a recipe for sausage stuffing. I find one, but believe there should be changes. If I log onto Yaytrail, I can now double click to the exact ingredient I think should be changed and leave my comment. My mother will log into her Yaytrail account, see my post and will know exactly what changes need to be made instead of worrying about the changes herself. She’ll be able to see my changes directly in front of her without any further work. What’s even better, is if she disagrees, she too can double click and leave additional comments as well. The extraordinary thing is that there is no miscommunication. My mother can no longer claim she “has no idea what changes I am attempting to make” because they are right there, in front of her, noted exactly at the precise spot I am referring to"

YayTrail is still very raw, but that’s our vision. Upcoming blogs will outline how we'll develop this concept further. For now though you can try out our preview if you wish, with FireFox at http://www.yaytrail.com. From next month you will be able to use YayTrail with Internet Explorer and a whole host of other popular browsers too. Now about that wild prediction I mentioned.... hmmmmm, still think it's not possible?!

Posted by Peter at 6:30 AM