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Reframe It Brings Facebook, Twitter, & Web Luminaries to its Annotation Tool

Written by Frederic Lardinois / March 30, 2009 1:00 PM / 6 Comments

reframeit_logo_mar09.pngReframe 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.

reframeit_facebook.png

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.


Comments

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  1. That's all good, but yet another example of a small startup storing my annotations.
    I still like to use YAWAS instead, which uses Google Bookmarks to store my annotations.
    http://www.keeness.net

    Posted by: Laurent | March 30, 2009 2:57 PM



  2. That's all good, but yet another example of a small startup storing my annotations.
    I still like to use YAWAS instead, which uses Google Bookmarks to store my annotations.

    Posted by: Laurent | March 30, 2009 3:05 PM



  3. From the page:"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."

    Posted by: Corvida Posted on FriendFeed   | March 30, 2009 3:12 PM



  4. We are trying to make sure that recipients of our Twitter/Facebook updates understand that the Tweets/Wall posts are contextual comments on outside web pages. The followers/friends can then decide whether to link to the comment in context or if they get enough meaning from the shared message alone. For a user this would be a real time update to your community of what you find compelling on the web.

    http://reframeit.com/comments/7kQ2VjlZ430

    Posted by: Jeff Jenkins (Reframe It Guy) | March 30, 2009 3:57 PM



  5. I tried to think so, but I found it was not as the same in the actual process. As you mentioned, I still have doubts, but really thank you for sharing!

    Posted by: runescape account | April 17, 2009 2:10 AM



  6. That's all good, but yet another example of a small startup storing my annotations.

    Posted by: dış cephe | August 12, 2009 7:13 AM



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