The idea of annotating the Web has been around for a long time. It goes back to a failed Web 1.0 startup called Third Voice. Today there are a handful of Web startups (Diigo, Fleck, Stickis, ShiftSpace, TrailFire) that let you mark up any Web page by adding virtual sticky notes or comments in a sidebar. One of these, ActiveWeave/Stickis, had to reboot as BlogRovr and eventually sold itself to BuzzLogic.

Now, a new startup that officially launches today, Reframe It, is trying its hand at the same game. The company has raised $700,000 from AD Gilhart & Co., and it boasts an impressive advisory board which includes Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Howard Rheingold. (Dyson was also an angel investor in ActiveWeave). But it is not clear how Reframe It will distinguish itself from the other Web annotation startups that have so far failed to spark a lot of interest among users.

Reframe It is a browser plug-in for Firefox or Internet Explorer that lets you highlight passages of text on a Web page and add your own comments in a side pane. Comment can be private, public, or visible only to certain groups. Anyone with the Reframe It plug-in can then see those comments in their side pane as they browse the Web. Reframe It also has a Twitter-like social feature that lets you follow other people’s comments, as well as comments within groups. You can follow these comments in an RSS feed, which you can track in your blog reader or other services such as FriendFeed. To help get you started, Reframe It allows you to import your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and (soon) LinkedIn and other services.

The service itself does a decent job of letting you markup the Web and read other members’ comments in context. The problem, as with all of the similar services that have come before it, is that the chances of coming across a Web page that has Reframe It comments is pretty small. So the side pane (which at least is collapsible) will be pretty useless for most people. The comments also are slow to load. It might appeal to heavy commenters, however.

But even there, disassociating comments from the pages where they appear is not always a good thing. Comments are becoming such an integral part of most Web pages (especially on blogs and media sites) that the best way to ensure the most people will read a comment is to add it directly to the page through each site’s commenting system. ReFrame It comments are only visible to other people who have added Reframe It to their browsers.

That is not to say that there is no value in extracting comments and republishing them as original content. In fact, some comment systems such as Disqus aim to do something similar by treating each commenter as an author and collecting their comments across all sites that use Disqus. Similarly, the ability to comment on links collected in FriendFeed or Facebook help to elevate and highlight the comments themselves. But the reason these discussions are interesting in their own right is because they are occurring among your friends or people you care about. What FriendFeed has shown also is that you don’t need to comment on the Web page itself. All you really need is the link.

The idea of web page annotation didn’t die with Third Voice, though. New services, each with unique features, have carried on.

Diigo

A must have for researchers
Diigo is a research tool that lets you share bookmarks and annotations on web pages using a browser plugin or bookmarklet. Notes are anchored to highlighted text and bookmarks save a cached copy of the site. Diigo will also let you save to multiple other bookmarking services (all the big ones) and email your annotated pages to friends who don’t have the plugin. We covered Diigo earlier.

Diigo has some advanced search functionality built in as well. With Diigo, you can search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines, social bookmarking systems, on blogs, within the current site, amongst inbound links, and seven different content verticals (TV, stock sites, etc.). Diigo also lets you post links to your blog through posts, or a “linkroll” widget listing your most recent annotations.

Fleck

Bare bones
Fleck is the most basic of the annotation services, letting you simply post public or private text notes on a page. Notes can be posted by using a browser plugin or by ajax when Fleck feeds web pages through its servers and adds the necessary annotation code. Permalinks to annotated pages can be emailed to friends and posted to blogs. We covered their launch previously and expect the company to be rolling out more features.

ShiftSpace

Have your way with any webpage
ShiftSpace is an opensource browser plugin (FF only) being developed by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program and is pretty close to internet graffiti. The plugin allows their users to annotate and remix a website saving it as a communally editable alternate version revealed in your browser by pressing Shift + Space. ShiftSpace allows users to leave notes, highlight text, change images, and edit the page source. It kind of reminds me of the web page analysis plugin Firebug, which allows you to carry out live edits of any web page. For web surfers with the plugin, modified pages are marked with a small ShiftSpace icon (§) in the bottom left side of the screen.

Modified pages are called “shifts”, and if made public, are shared on the ShiftSpace website. Users can subscribe to the shifts of users they like via RSS. The ShiftSpace team also plans to implement “trails”, which are hyperlinked collections of related shifts.

Stickis

Subscribe to only the annotations you want
Stickis is a web page annotation service that lets you subscribe to content “channels” from your friends and the community via a browser plugin. We previously covered their launch. You can also view notes without the plugin when they are served by proxy through Stickis’ website. Channels can consist of text and image sticky notes, RSS feeds (blogs), and even specialized data channels for web services such as OpenTable or Yelp. Every note you make is also stored on your personal Stickis blog, which leaves a trackback to itself if you annotate a blog.

When you subscribe to a channel, it stays with you while surfing the web in a collapsible sidebar, suggesting content based on what page you’re on. Specialized channels, like OpenTable or Yelp, pop up reservation options and restaurant reviews when you visit a page linking to a restaurant. Other content channels populate the tray with notes based on an analysis of a the URL and the note’s tags. When you click on a note, it brings up the notes on the page along with comments on the note made by your friends.

Stickis parent company, Activeweave, also recently announced BlogRovR, a simpler version of Stickis that feeds you blog content from your favorite bloggers as you search surf the web.

Trailfire

Create and share tours of the web
We covered Trailfire’s launch last August. Since then, the social website annotation service has developed considerably, recently announcing some more of the social features it originally promised.

Trailfire is an IE and Firefox plugin that lets you post notes (called marks) right on top of a webpage and string them together with hyperlinks (making “trails”). The plugin consists of a note button for leaving marks and a sidebar for managing your trails. When you arrive at a page you’re interested in marking up, you click the mark button, which pops up a little ajax balloon with a text editor inside that you can position anywhere on the page. In the editor, you can compose a message out of text, images, and hyperlinks. You then title the mark and select which trail (group of notes) it belongs to. Trails can be posted public or private and commented on. When a trail is posted, you follow it by just clicking next.

The new version of the service will now include the ability to make friends and share with them, follow all the trails made by a user, gather your friends into groups, and allow trails to be edited together by multiple users (wiki trails).

Compared with other annotation services, Trailfire has expanded in what I find to be a more effective way. Unlike services like Diigo, and Stickis, Trailfire has really helped its exposure by not requiring a sign-in or download to see annotations unlike Stickis and Diigo (to see notes). Fleck matches this simplicity. For people without the plugin, Trailfire serves the annotated sites through its servers, embedding ajax notes within the page. Trailfire will now also let you add notes to a page through their proxy by a newly released bookmarklet.

Secondly, Trailfire has implemented personal trail pages that consists of a numbered list of each of the links in the trail along with a thumbnail of the website. This has enabled search engines to index their pages and generate a fair amount of organic traffic. One such example was an April fools trail on the site, which received over 168,000 uniques on April 1st, due in large part to search engine traffic.

To use Trailfire, download and install the extension (available for Firefox and IE). This will add two buttons and a menu bar item. Use the buttons to open and close the Trailfire sidebar, and to mark a page (see screenshot). When a page is marked, a popup appears where you enter a trail name, a title and a description. When you mark other pages using the same “trail name”, they are grouped together. marks can be set to public or private, and users can choose to view just their own, or everyone’s, annotations on a website. Their product roadmap calls for the addition of social networking features like adding friends and having the ability to set group-based viewing permissions.

Annotated pages can also be shared with others, even if they don’t have the extension installed. Trailfire serves the page through their proxy server and adds the appropriate code for the annotation. More information about Trailfire is on their About page here.

Companies continue to tweak the del.icio.us model of social bookmarking in an attempt to find the right mix of features and usability to appeal to a mass market crowd. I like the ability to bookmark and annotate a page in a single action – others may like Trailfire, too.

Trailfire was founded by CEO John O’Halloran and CTO Pat Ferrel. They closed a $2 million venture round from Voyager Capital and individual angel investors.