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The premise behind their big investment round was that they would take their annotation tech to the rest of the web. The only place I've personally seen it use
by jraines 10y ago
The premise behind their big investment round was that they would take their annotation tech to the rest of the web.
The only place I've personally seen it used is for people to snarkily mark-up political op-eds.
It's a cool vision -- I wish I could see, for a given article, the best inline comments or just those of people I find credible -- but it doesn't seem scalable to the wide web, as there just aren't enough people willing to put smart commentary on every article instead of just firing off a few tweets, commenting on the article at an aggregator like reddit (which gives a signal of which things are worth commenting on, and a built-in audience for the commentary) or writing their own post.
- smacktoward 10y agoThere's also the problem that adding the annotation layer on top of the original article can impact performance. I've seen some examples of people using Genius annotation in exactly the segment you mention (political/journalistic), and in every case the annotated version was slow to load and sluggish to browse through. It got to the point where seeing the mention of annotation was enough to kill my interest in clicking through to read more. "Annotating other people's content" is one of those evergreen ideas that keeps popping up (here's an article I wrote about a startup doing the same thing, way back in 1999: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2006/12/third_voice_wro/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2006/12/third_voice_wro/), but every time someone tries it implementation issues seem to kill them.
- reneherse 10y agoThanks for the link to your article. Here's another service from 2009 that died on the same path: https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/blerp-aims-to-turn-the-web-into-one-big-forum/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/blerp-aims-to-turn-the-web...
- CPLX 10y agoI just pulled my old dead-trees copy of the classic Fucked Companies book off the shelf to remind myself of the one I remembered dying in the first dotcom era: https://m.imgur.com/dD4nOol https://m.imgur.com/dD4nOol
- jerf 10y agoThat's the one smacktoward referenced.
- smacktoward 10y agoYep, Third Voice is the one I was writing about in '99. What's interesting is that Genius seems to have run into the same brick wall Third Voice did: people who make Web sites really hate having randos mark them up. See, for instance, these two articles on Genius from last year: http://observer.com/2016/03/genius-web-annotator-emma-dawson-alana-massey/ http://observer.com/2016/03/genius-web-annotator-emma-dawson... http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/03/news_genius_wants_to_annotate_the_entire_web_at_what_cost.html http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/03/news_... The complaints in those pieces are exactly the same ones that people were making about Third Voice back in the '90s. Exactly the same. And Genius' defense ("But your blog is public!") is exactly the same too. I feel like maybe there's just a fundamental issue of empathy here: the kind of person who launches an annotation startup can't understand the complicated emotions the kind of person who writes in public has about their writing. So they keep stepping on toes by barging in too strongly, instead of looping the content creators in early to get them on board (or at least figure out how to make an annotation product that doesn't offend their sensibilities too much).
- ryandrake 10y agoThe last paragraph in that kind of makes me cry a little inside. Apparently if I want to get a normal job at a tech company, I need to be able to implement R-star on a whiteboard under pressure, but if I want to be CEO all I had to do was invent chewy granola bars...
- trollsonson 10y agoKeep studying those whiteboard problems. We can't have you going off and thinking for yourself now. Please don't forget to sign our interview NDA, our restrictive employment contract, and your severance agreement.
- 10y ago
- blackaspen 10y agoReFrameIt and Me.Dium were also two annotation startups. It's something that people keep trying over and over again. While neat, I honestly don't expect it to ever catch on.
- bri3d 10y agoI worked at another deadpooled-ish internet annotation company in the 2008-2009 timeframe, called Reframeit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1swp-2QeMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1swp-2QeMI We worked as an embeddable product like Genius as well as a browser extension, and we had similar issues: client-side performance, "how do you anchor things to a page that's probably going to change out from under you," and "how do you scale to serve the combined traffic of every site you serve comments on without spending more money than you make?" I think web annotation is a good idea but probably needs to live in a moneymaking niche for a while before it can grow to the broader web. Lyrics were an interesting start for Genius but it's tough to make money there. Law, news, internal research, etc. seem like interesting starts to me.
- roymurdock 10y agoFermat's Library does annotations for important academic papers. The papers are sent to subscribers at a good cadence - once per week. I enjoy reading them. Not sure if it could ever be a monetizable business, and I doubt the team running it is considering charging. http://fermatslibrary.com/ http://fermatslibrary.com/
- jxramos 10y agoI wonder if a first use case could focus in on something like https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/, get people hooked somehow, then generalize it to future changes by pointing back at some snapshot maybe.
- rhizome 10y agoPersonally, I dislike the "get people hooked" formulation.
- gkop 10y agoI also worked at Reframe It, after you left. To add to your point, Disqus is also struggling: https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/disqus-lays-off-11-as-it-plans-a-deeper-focus-on-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/disqus-lays-off-11-as-it-p...
- pinaceae 10y agoHow exactly were they pitching their actual business model? Any clue? I get the annotation idea, but how the hell do you make significant money off of it?
- CPLX 10y ago1. Have the "right kind" of founders, Ivy League, brash and exciting and magnets for press. Also have the "right kind" of company, lots of coders and claims of having an engineering culture. 2. Have a somewhat successful user generated content site. 3. Mutter some generalities about how we're "not just X man, we're like totally X for the entire internet" 4. ?? 5. Profit
- ryandrake 10y agoDon't forget telling anyone who will listen how you're the "Uber of [industry]".
- rcarrigan87 10y agoI'm not a huge fan of the founders or the overall biz model (if there was one) but when they raised a bunch of money they did have pretty solid traction with users and that can sometimes be enough for VCs to take a gamble. $15m was entirely too much money. But that was a particularly frothy time. I don't think that deal would get done today.
- CPLX 10y agoThey raised $56.8 million at a valuation of close to a billion dollars for a site that at the time was basically a lyrics site with not bad UI and SEO.
- systematical 10y agoNot bad UI, but I wouldn't call the site good UI by any stretch. It loads fast and is simplistic, two things I appreciate, but it definitely lacks something. And whats with that logo?
- gnicholas 10y ago> The only place I've personally seen it used is for people to snarkily mark-up political op-eds. And for news specifically, there are tools like Fiskkit [1], that offer tags that are used a lot in that context: logical fallacy, untrue/uncited statement, etc. Perhaps these domain-specific tools are the only things that will ever catch on (like Rap Genius originally did). 1: http://fiskkit.com/ http://fiskkit.com/
- sparkzilla 10y agoFiskkit's tags are the way forward for political commentary, because they can educate people on the tools that politicians and writers use to persuade them. As for lyrics, it appears as though Genius never got away from rap. I've always found their lyric analysis to be very poor quality.