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?!
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
"Finally a medium I can sink my words into"
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
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
...
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"YayTrail has the power to begin to change the way we all use the web" - a User blog
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.
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.
...
Continue Reading
Monday, December 28, 2009
10 Questions with the people behind YayTrail
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...
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...
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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.
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