The idea of collaborative annotation has been around since the beginning of the web. I tried to launch an annotation startup myself back in 2000, and there were several funded competitors back then. It never catches on. It would be interesting to analyze why people just don't use these systems when given the opportunity. Is this a solution in search of a problem?
I have a pet theory that Twitter is the ultimate annotation platform that’s been right in front of us the whole time. The reason it doesn’t seem like one is because it blurs the line between “annotation” and “conversation”.
I think the dynamic is similar: while a normal annotation is a comment on a fragment of text, a Twitter reply is (or at least can be) a comment on a single portion of a longer thread.
Two notable differences:
- While a typical annotation platform takes a freely-written text and allows any segment to be annotated, Twitter forces the author of a thread to compose their text with the segment boundaries in mind.
- While a normal annotation system doesn’t allow you to annotate the annotations, any given “annotation” on Twitter may itself be a thread which allows for annotation. It’s recursive!
Maybe the above is a stretch, but personally I think it’s an interesting way to think about Twitter.
People's informational bits are not unified as html or pdf. They could be anywhere: html on web (more than one browser), html on mobile (which browser is it?), pdf here, pdf there; tons of apps icons, whatsapps, facebook, bookmarks galore, blah, blah. We are all over the place. Annotation on the other hand is a tool for organized individuals. Life is not necessarily organized for most people, hence, this never got picked up.
Annotation should have been part of the browser from day one. It should have evolved with it when things moved on to the mobile world. It never happened.
I think generalized annotation has the following problem:
Draw a graph of all web pages ordered by how many times they are visited. You get a power law distribution. On the left are things like CNN's front page, on the right things like a text file containing a cheesecake recipe someone posted in 1995 that is technically still online but nobody has visited in years.
On the left side are pages that are visited too often, and public annotations inevitably descend into madness and chaos, even worse than comment sections which have the courtesy to at least be isolated on the page to a certain area. On these pages, trying to use the annotation software is worse than not using it at all.
On the right are the pages that nobody visits, so when you visit them, there is no chance of any annotations being on the page, nor any chance that if you leave any annotations anybody will ever see them, or care if they do (i.e., just giving people a directory of "rarely annotated pages" doesn't solve the problem, the problem is that nobody cares about these pages anyhow). Annotation software doesn't harm these pages technically, but the user experience is at best that the user will just forget about their annotation software, and at worst, they'll feel alone on the page, a concept not previously in their mental model and one that is not contributing to a positive assessment of the annotation software.
In between is the sweet spot, where participation is adequate that the annotation software brings some sort of value, but it isn't just overwhelming chaos.
I submit to you that viewed through the power law lens, that sweet spot is actually fairly narrow. Moreover, if you slice through a single user's browser history looking for when they hit pages in that sweet spot, it'll still be the minority of pages that they viewed, so basically by statistical necessity, the pages where the software added value must be a tiny minority of the pages you visit. The majority of pages they visit, the annotation software experience ranges from extremely net negative to at best neutral, and it's hard for the positive experiences to make up for that.
Moreover, this sweet spot is moving. As more of the general public tries out your software, the sweet spot moves to the right, which also has the effect when viewed from a single user's point of view of making the pages where it is useful become more rare. When you're just starting out and you've got a 100 users, the useful pages are things like "the front page of CNN" and "the hot wikipedia article about $CURRENT_EVENT", but as your user count increases it moves down to specific articles on CNN and only the linked content from the $CURRENT_EVENT, then only to archival content on CNN and random Wikipedia pages, and just in general into stuff that becomes increasingly difficult for it to be any significant percentage of the pages you visit.
I think this is why A: They can't get popular B: the ones that I know about that have been around for a while and are therefore presumably successful enough for someone to consider them worthwhile can only stay so provided they don't get more popular and C: there's no chance you can make money in this space because you get an anti-network effect... the more users you get, the less valuable the service becomes to every existing user!
I think this is also why it seems like such an appealing idea. You create a prototype, get a couple of friends on it, it seems like fun and to be useful. You annotate some popular pages, you have some similar interests and you annotate, I dunno, the latest game console announcement or something, and it seems like fun. The problem is, rather than this being the worst the experience will ever be as it just gets better and better as more people come online, this is the best it will ever be.
Also, I can tell you from the first couple of times around that if this did become popular, the content producers of the Internet would fight you tooth and nail. They did the first couple of times when the math sort of worked to at least get to the point that these things could get in the news. With the web so much larger and power-law-y and the anti-network effect correspondingly so much more powerful, now this sort of thing can't even be successful enough to so much as get noticed by anyone before it has already collapsed.
(I specifically said "generalized" annotation at the top, because specialized use cases can get around some of these issues. But it's going to be hard to make any money on the size of user base you can support, because while you can mitigate the anti-network effect, it's always going to be looming over you if you try to get large enough.)
Annotation systems don't have to be public. The default should be private with an option to make parts public as necessary. Comments in some sense are annotations that are anchored at the wrong place and with the wrong visibility (public instead of private).
The main value of annotations is as a personal knowledge system anchored on top of public knowledge. As one's private knowledge grows it eventually reaches a point where it needs to be summarized. A good annotation system helps with this summarization process (which mostly comes down to having a good search and navigation system).
I think annotations can be made to work but the starting point has to be about personal use and not public use.
The person I was responding to specifically mentioned "collaborative annotation" and startups. Non-collaborative annotation has different tradeoffs. It may be useful to you, but I can't imagine there's any money there for a startup. It avoids the anti-network effects that kill annotations, and it avoids publisher objections too, but it also doesn't have a very compelling value proposition for very many people. It's like trying to make money off of people who like mind maps, literate programming, or who use personal wikis.... it's non-zero amounts of people, often very passionate people, but it's not much of a market.
Why is there no money in a personal annotation system? I'd think any large organization would be willing to pay a lot of money to use a tool that would make its members more productive and effective.
In fact, Coda and Notion.so are very successful products and they're basically personal/private annotation systems (modulo storing everything in the cloud). I can imagine extending Coda and Notion.so with programmatic capabilities and adding offline storage and turning them into pretty successful personal annotation systems with premium features for supporting organizational work and collaboration.
There is plenty of money in this market when viewed from the right angle.
This is really insightful. I know it's different when you're talking about private annotations, but in the context of the original dream of public annotations where it was hoped that you would benefit from benevolent and knowledgeable strangers who previously annotated the factual errors in the article you happen to be reading, I think you've absolutely identified the key problem.
This is causing me to realize that the value of Wikipedia is not the fact that the pages are editable by the public; it's that there exists a process (as flawed and controversial as it is) for debating over the various contributions and edits that leads to a single, unified version of any given page. More than anything else, that consolidation process is Wikipedia. A successful consolidation process has to be present in order for any system of public contributions (annotations or otherwise) to produce a coherent result.
I agree. I used to work for Hypothesis a very long time ago and this is the conclusion I came to as well. Pivoting to serve the academic community annotating PDFs was a good idea (this happened after I had left).
I'd imagine an issue is that there's just no place to go for it. If a big existing community introduced annotations, I'd bet it could catch on. Imagine clicking through an article from facebook and you automatically get annotations. Hell, on mobile you already have these apps using built in browsers so you don't leave the app. Something like that, where annotations are discoverable, could definitely gain traction. Then there'd be no escaping facebook (or twitter or reddit or HN) even on other sites.
