YayTrail Blog

Yaytrail at Open Soho!

2010-02-25T04:25:00.000-08:00

Thanks for following the YayTrail story. Last Tuesday, February 23rd our co-founder Tom Kehoe had his first encounter with the London social media scene!
Here’s what he had to say;

Courtesy of Paul Walsh (Irish Opportunist, a founder chair, CEO, Mentor and Advisor to Internet and Mobile companies) I was invited to meet London’s biggest and brightest entrepreneurial tech talents at the “Open Soho 16 event”.

I must admit I was a little anxious prior to going to the event (at a secret location in London’s west end) but on arrival I was so impressed at how laid back and relaxed the vibe was about the place! Within minutes of signing up I was immediately welcomed to the group like a long lost friend and this alone made me feel instantly relaxed to go about trumpeting the efforts of the YayTrail project to date. Of course this always helps with the aid of a free-bar and again while it lasted, YayTrail enjoyed the host’s generous offerings!
It was refreshing to see so many creative people in attendance, each one of them having a story to tell and those who have tread the path, and been successful, only too happy to help in whatever way they can. This sort of advice and networking is truly priceless for start-ups like ourselves.

The evening was pretty much as it says on the tin for networking purposes, with a brief interlude coming in the form of a guest speaker, on this occasion, Mark O Neill (Chief Information Officer for the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport ) who gave a 15 minute brief on “how do organisations innovate?”

Some thanks are in order:
Yaytrail would like to thank Victoria Atherstone and Poppy Dinsey (http://www.schoolforstartups.co.uk) for their kindness and generosity in introducing me to their circle of influential friends. Also a big up to Timothy Bosworth (www.thinkbigbebiggroup.com), Paul Tanner, Sheetal Mehta, Sam Sethi, and once again special thanks to Paul Walsh (particularly for listening to my 30 second Yaytrail pitch! Hope you liked it! ) and finally the hosts Iomart hosting and BT TradeSpace for sponsoring this excellent event.

I can’t recommend this event enough; everyone who has an interest in doing business in fun and relaxed surroundings or just wants to learn some more from some of the most creative minds around should be here. We are already looking forward to the next one!

Feedback buttton & Why I used YayTrail today.

2010-02-17T01:06:00.000-08:00

Thanks for continuing to follow the YayTrail story. As we continue to add new YayTrail followers we have been looking to find a quick way to provide the all-important feedback that we need in order to build the best posssible product for you. Of course, you can all do it by just clicking anywhere on the page (a la our preferred YayTrail way!) and we will see your comment if we’re following you that is!

Alternatively you can just post a comment to us on our blog at http://yaytrail.blogspot.com/ or email your comments to us at feedback@yaytrail.com.
In the absence of all that, we have installed a nifty little feedback button (this will be a grey feedback button) which will be located on the right hand side of the webpage. This is very easy to use, just click on the feedback, a pop-up box will appear allowing you to post your comments and that's it your done.
We are very encouraged by all the feedback so far. In the main it has all been positive, most comments have been that it is an innovative idea (of course we agree!) while others think that "there is a small learning curve in getting familiar with it." Many others have commented about the need for newcomers to the website to be given some form of crashcourse to learn how to use it. We're taking all of this on board, and are currently working on improving the usability and look and feel for the site. We think you will like what you see when we release our next version, scheduled to be before the end of March.
One other piece of feedback came from a regular YayTrail account holder who would prefer not to be named, we very much liked it and with his permission we reproduce it below. We think it very subtly makes a powerful message about the uses of the YayTrail product.

Why I used YayTrail today.
"The author Terry Pratchett recently made a speech on the subject of ‘assisted suicide’. It was a deeply moving speech not least because the author himself has a very rare type of early onset Alzheimer's disease. The speech was carried by BBC television as part of the Richard Dimbleby series of lectures. I tuned in by accident and quickly became transfixed by what Mr Pratchett had to say. His speech was at times moving, funny, profound, deeply sad yet also full of life.
You may wonder what this has to do with Yaytrail. Well, I am not a skilled writer, and I am certainly not in the class of Terry Pratchett. I wanted to share what he had to say with others but to let his words speak for themselves. I also have no wish to preach or to convert others but simply to share a very beautiful human story. In doing so I didn’t want to summarise what he had to say. I also didn’t want to share my interpretation of his words as I believe those words will touch different parts in all of us.
This is why I turned to Yaytrail to share Terry Pratchett’s speech. As I watched and listened I felt drawn into his inner world. I felt like more than just an objective observer but rather, for a short time, that I was sharing a part of his subjective world. When I reflect on my experience it seemed like I needed to communicate what it was like listening to him. Sending a link in an email to the speech seemed cold and detached. I thought that making an ‘inline’ comment on Yaytrail would express the fact that for around fifty minutes I felt part of what he had to say. Yaytrail seemed like the best way to communicate my experience without in any way detracting from his words. Of course I could have used other methods but at times in life we make decisions to communicate with others by certain means not solely for technological reasons but also for personal reasons. If a friend is going through a difficult time we sometimes alter our method of communication out of sensitivity for their feelings. I thought that Yaytrail would allow me to share how I felt listening to Terry Pratchett but to do so without making the story about me. So this is why I used Yaytrail today".

Thoughts & Highlights from the Dublin Web Summit

2010-02-08T04:16:00.000-08:00

Thursday saw the meeting of some 400+ internet professionals and entrepeneurs for an evening of panel discussion, key-note addresses from some big names and plenty of networking at Trinity College Dublin’s second Dublin Web Summit. From our start-up perspective it was amazing to see the strength and diversity of interest present – as overheard being asked in the crowded queue to enter, who knew there were so many ‘Internet people’ in Dublin?

If the summit was anything to go by, the Internet industry here is in pretty rude health. The atmosphere at the conference was pretty overwhelmingly one of optimism and possibility. Some of the things that struck us:

- The amazing story of DoneDeal.ie. Less than 5 years old and and now one of the busiest places to sell goods online in Ireland, with over 50,000 currently active ads. Back when this site was founded, it’s likely few thought there’d be any room left in the market for online classifieds, with the likes of eBay already so well entrenched. But as is turns out, there was ample potential for a new local startup. A very welcome sight.

- Chris Horn’s warnings about the treatment of failure in Ireland, including a startling comparison of the bankruptcy process in Ireland compared to the UK. In Ireland it seems the cost of failure is high, and there was much nodding agreement with statements about the need to destigmatise failure in business in Ireland if it is to have the kind of entrepeneurial culture we might hope for.

- Wired UK editor at large, Ben Hammersley’s advice on so-called ‘information overload’ – stop subscribing to stuff! Content filtering and the need to improve content discovery in an age of information abundance was a recurring theme at the conference. On an adjacent point, there was much skepticism over attempts to erect paywalls around news online, certainly beyond the short term. News just isn’t special anymore – but analysis and investigative reporting might still be able to command value.

- Matt Mullenweg’s one-sentence advice to everyone in the room: Learn to code! Ben Hammersley’s? Make it – whatever it is you’re making – beautiful. In time of fast and cheap commodistation of ideas, apparently it’s the beautiful things people remember in the long term. Though Craig Newmark, who was also on the panel, might have something to say about that (he of the hugely successful, but unashamedly unpretty, Craigslist).

The evening was packed with interesting case studies, shared anecdotes and insight – a big success for its organiser, Paddy Cosgrave, and his team. Looking forward to the next Dublin Web Summit, apparently due in a few months.

First media coverage

2010-02-05T11:00:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to highlight our first little bit of media exposure at Irish technology site SiliconRepublic. As an Irish outfit we're really pleased to have a local media outlet introduce us to new people. Check out the article here:

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/15133/new-media/irish-brothers-set-out-to-redefine-the-internet-experience

Their coverage of the Dublin Web Summit is also worth a look! YayTrail was there, and we'll have a blog on some thoughts from the conference a little later.

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

2010-01-23T06:30:00.000-08:00

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?!

"Finally a medium I can sink my words into"

2010-01-14T09:53:00.001-08:00

Just a heads up on a blog written by YayTrail user Christine Sherwood (AKA CheekyChristine, on her thoughts about YayTrail and how she sees it fitting into her social networking world.

To quote Christine: "Sinking my words and thoughts into the pages I care about transcends just commenting on random articles about the 2010 World Cup or recipes for my mom to peruse. It’s the ability to communicate and expedite thoughts to change ideas, transform projects, help students, colleagues and anyone else you need to reach.

The concept behind YayTrail is one of the more innovative ideas I’ve seen. It’s an efficiency tool. A tool to work along side any other social networking site; any other website in general. It’s a tool to enhance your online experience not take away from anything else you are currently using."

Head over to Christine's blog and check out her full thoughts at: http://www.cheekychristine.com/2010/01/yay-for-yaytrail-finally-medium-i-can.html

"YayTrail has the power to begin to change the way we all use the web" - a User blog

2010-01-14T09:52:00.000-08:00

What follows is a blog by YayTrail user 'BH' (http://www.yaytrail.com/BH)

My relationship with technology is always changing. I was a technophile in the mid 90s when I built my own PCs and worked in the IT sector. But my thoughts and feelings towards technology began to change about 8 years ago when I left the industry to follow my dream of training as a psychotherapist. Technology was no longer the centre of my day and in recent years the arrival of social networking and video sharing websites intrigued me but never enough for me to pay them more than passing interest. They were different and useful but seemed to me to be mostly adaptations of old and existing technology.

So when I first heard about YayTrail I found it more than a little difficult to shake off my weariness of ‘new’ technology. But the more I looked into what YayTrail allowed and might be capable of the more I became excited by what seems to me to be the first true innovation on the world wide web in years. I realised that YayTrail was offering something revolutionary where the internet could for the first time become a fully interactive experience.

Of course social networking, fan forums and so on have for some time allowed some degree of online participation but the problem is that getting involved in that way still has too many constraints. I visited an online TV show forum recently and one single topic had over 20,000 replies posted. Who on earth has the time, energy or desire to wade their way through that many posts most of which aren’t saying anything of particular interest to anyone other than the people who wrote them? I have found similar problems with well known online book and DVD retailers. There are often hundreds of customer reviews from strangers that don’t say anything more revealing than “5/5 Great movie! I loved it” or “1/5 I hated it”. Then there are others who give ‘one out of five stars’ for the strangest of reasons such as not liking the picture on the cover of a novel or DVD.

YayTrail changes all of this and more. YayTrail allows you to perform tasks like posting your opinions of a book you’ve read, movie that you’ve seen or anything thing else that catches your interest. You can do so anywhere, anytime, on any web page and anyone on YayTrail can decide whether or not they want to see your edits and comments so unlike email there is no danger of SPAM. If you don’t like what someone else on YayTrail has to say you can simply choose not to trail them. You are no longer forced to wade your way through pages and pages of largely uninformative reviews of a product you are thinking of purchasing. You can simply choose to see the review posted by a friend, by a select number of people or everyone as you wish and all of this can be done without compromising the integrity of the original webpage.

But that is only the beginning because YayTrail doesn’t just allow you to insert comments but allows you to fully edit any web page. You can then share these edited web pages with your friends, who in turn can make further changes or edits and then share them with yet more people. As a student I could, through YayTrail, have a completely interactive discussion about a poem, book or scientific theory online. I would no longer need to write in an email or message board something like “on page 26, paragraph three..........”. With YayTrail I can simply insert a comment at that exact line on the page and other students or teachers can in turn add their own comments in the same way. A whole discussion can grow but at any stage you can still switch back and forth between the original and edited page at the click of a button.

YayTrail is still in its infancy. At the moment edits and comments can only be made in the form of text but I hear that pictures and video edits will be possible soon. Like social networking it depends on its user base. It requires people to get involved in order for it to work at its best. YayTrail has the power to begin to change the way we all use the web but that will only happen as more and more people get involved. I’ve only touched upon one or two possible uses of YayTrail here so why not take the few seconds it requires to sign up and see what YayTrail can do for you. So get involved, give it a try and see the future of the world wide web unfold before you. I look forward to meeting you there.

10 Questions with the people behind YayTrail

2009-12-28T04:31:00.000-08:00

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...

Our first video! What is YayTrail?

2009-12-19T03:55:00.000-08:00

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!

An aside: The changing media landscape - Moving to a more open web

2009-12-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

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

Development Update - Following Friends, Avatars, Colours & more

2009-12-10T15:39:00.000-08:00

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.

Update - Iteration 2!

2009-11-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

We've recently updated the yaytrail extension code with some new features.

In order to get the new code you may need to refresh your browser, or failing that, clear your browser's cache and refresh again. With future updates, clearing your cache should be unnecessary.

This update replaces the previous code with a whole new set of code we've been working on over the past number of weeks.

So what’s the difference?

The biggest difference this update brings is behind the scenes - the new code is based around an entirely new foundation. The net result of this should be much faster and easier updates in the future, as our code is now built for extensibility rather than as a quick-and-dirty prototype.

Although most of what's new is in the plumbing, there are also some changes to the user experience we'd like to highlight in this blog. These include:

Blinking cursor

Most text-input on computers is guided by a little blinking cursor, and we don't think yaytrail should be any different! Now when you double click, a blinking cursor will indicate where you are typing. You can move this cursor to another part of the page by clicking on another word, and can move it within your edit using the left and right arrow keys too.

Copy & Paste

Another important 'must-have' in a text editing system is copy-and-paste, and this update adds this functionality to yaytrail.

Save indicator

As before, you double click a second time to end your editing session and save your edits. Now when an edit is saved it will momentarily flash yellow to confirm to you that it has indeed been saved.

Better control over where you can type

A lot of you have asked some good questions like - why can't I insert an edit between a word and a full stop or after a space? Why can't I create a new paragraph?

Now you can do all these things. You need no longer be constrained to the paragraphs already in a webpage - bring the cursor to the end of a paragraph and hit enter, and you're in your own little space underneath. We don't yet have full punctuation detection, but the cursor now also can see where there's a fullstop, a space, and a number of other special characters to let you edit in and amongst these on a page.

Identity

An obvious shortcoming of the old code was the lack of any identification on edits. It was impossible to see who wrote what! We're still working on the best way to present this information while keeping a light visual presence, but in this update we've added a user's profile photo to the start of an edit. Mouse over the avatar and the author's username will pop up, or click on the picture to go to the author's Trail page.

You can change your picture in the Settings page. We've had feeback to say that the upload system hasn't been working for some users, but we're currently working to fix that, so hopefully soon you'll all have your own profile picture for handy identification of edit authors. Stay tuned for more on that soon.

Notes on other differences and usage

Please do note the following differences from our first iteration:

Usage of the new interface is quite similar to the previous iteration, but there are a couple of differences to bear in mind.

When you first double-click on a page now, it is more akin to turning on the page's edit-mode, so to speak. Rather than just opening up one space within which you can type, a double-click will bring the cursor onto the page and allow you to move it around elsewhere on the page with a single click of your left mouse button. So now, you can double-click, type an edit in one place, and then click to move the cursor somewhere else on the page and make a second edit there, and so on. Then, when you are finished, double-click the page again to turn edit-mode off and save your new edits. Also, be sure that when you double-click to save that you double-click anywhere on the page outside of any edits you have made (clicks on edits are currently disabled so a double-click on an edit to save will go unrecognised!).

Work in Progress

This update represents a work in progress. As always, we need your help to test and refine yaytrail. Undoubtedly there are bugs to be found and fixed with this updated code, so give yaytrail a whirl and let us know what you think. Heck, invite your friends too and let them experience the power of having their own personal web!

If you need any help at all in using yaytrail, don't be shy about letting us know, no matter the problem. And 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.

Have fun!

Introducing YayTrail and our blog

2009-09-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago we launched our first preview of YayTrail to a small group of testers - a communication tool that allows our users to open up the web around them and to edit it in new ways, creating a web experience is that is more personal and customised, and to share this with their friends.

YayTrail has been developed in the context of a web that is now all about participation and creation. More and more people are adding their stamp to the web - through blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, comments, message boards and so much more besides. We all leave a trail of content behind us - ideas, thoughts, insights, brilliance, silliness and everything in between.

With that in mind, we'd like to give you more control over how you can create and share content on the web around you. We want to break open the webpage to allow you leave your mark where you want and how you want. Our users can edit news stories with their own contributions right in line with the journalists, embellish recipes with their own twist on cookery sites, add corrections and additional tips to how-to guides, voice personal experience with products at online stores and company websites, breathe new life into out-of-date information, add notes and summaries to online learning material...and so much more. Every webpage becomes open to your contribution, your ideas, your voice. Importantly, your content is a first class citizen with YayTrail - your comments need no longer be buried amongst a sea of strangers. Type your content where you see fit, and when your friends visit that page, they'll see your writing right there where you left it, cleanly in-line with the structure of the page. Follow your friends too, and turn your web into a social and personal one to see what the people you care about think, quickly and easily.

Our current release is early, and by no means feature-complete. For the purposes of this preview, all users are following each other through their inbox, but soon you'll be able to pick and choose the people you want to follow. The software is early too, and currently available for FireFox only.

If you'd like to try YayTrail out, we're still taking new signups here. This is just the beginning, and we'd like you on board to help us create something special! The feedback so far has been amazing - thanks to all those who've signed up already. We hope to deliver on your feedback as the service matures, and hope we can continue to enjoy your ideas and recommendations. To help open up feedback channels further, we're starting this blog to provide a space where we can share news, announcements, development updates and hints and tips on getting the most out of YayTrail. Further posts will appear here to keep you in the loop, so check back soon!