Reframe It, a social web annotation tool we first reviewed last Fall, just announced that it has added integration with Twitter and Facebook to its features today. Thanks to this, users can now syndicate their annotations to both Twitter and Facebook, where they can continue their discussions with friends who are not using Reframe It yet.
Reframe It also announced that it has added Lawrence Lessig, John Seely Brown, Terry Winograd, and Clay Shirky to its Advisory Board, which already includes an all-star line-up of Internet luminaries like Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Howard Rheingold.
]]> We talked to Reframe It's founder Robert Fishkin last week, and he stressed that Reframe It is also currently looking at a number of interesting revenue models, including co-branding agreements with newspapers and deals with ad networks. According to Fishkin, Reframe It is currently seeing a solid growth rate of about 3% every day.Recommended by Mozilla
Reframe It also recently became a recommended addon by Mozilla, which should allow the company to grow its user base at an even faster rate.
Facebook and Twitter Integration
Reframe It's Facebook and Twitter integration works just as advertised. Given that Reframe It is still a small service, these new features will not only provide more visibility to Reframe It, but they will also allow users to start a discussion on the service and then take it to their favorite social network, where the rest of their friends and colleagues can chime in.
Brian T. McKinney, Reframe It's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, tells us that the service will support Twitter's oAuth implementation in the second half of April, but for now, you still have to enter your full Twitter username and password to use the service.
How Does it Work?
We really like Reframe It's approach to social annotations, and the user interfaces of its web service and Firefox plugin are easy to use and very efficient. Once you have signed up for Reframe It and installed the plugin, the extension lives in your sidebar and will show any public annotations that other users have left by default. To add your own annotations, you just have to highlight a chunk of text and Reframe It will automatically use this as the anchor for your annotation. Through this, you can basically write comments into the margins of the Internet.
Fishkin told us that a lot of Reframe It's users utilize the service in a professional setting to annotate legal texts, for example, but a lot of users also use it in a school setting. Thanks to Reframe It's private groups, your annotations can stay private, though you can also choose to make your comments available to all Reframe It users.
Reframe It is clearly on to something, and thanks to its stellar advisory board and the team's clear vision for where they want the service to go, we expect to hear a lot more from them in the future. Other services like Diigo, for example, offer very similar services, however, and it remains to be seen which service users will prefer in the long run.
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