ReframeIt: Annotating the Web
The market for social web site annotation and bookmarking services is getting a bit crowded these days, with tools like Diigo and SocialBrowse vying for customers along with a large number of smaller competitors. The latest entry in this market is ReframeIt, which just launched today. ReframeIt's emphasis is squarely on annotation, both for personal use and for sharing among small groups. While its feature set is a bit limited compared to some of its competitors, ReframeIt represents one of the better implementations of social annotations we have seen so far. ReframeIt is available as an extension for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Extension
The extension lives on the right side of the browser window and can be expanded and closed at any time. Comments can be kept private, or shared with individuals and groups, as well as with the whole ReframeIt community. Once you share a comment, other users can rate it, bookmark it, or share it with other users. On pages with many comments, you can also filter annotations by ratings, number of replies, and shares.
Lots of Social Features
ReframeIt also provides its users with extensive social features on its web site. As has become standard for social sites, you can also 'follow' other users and be notified when they leave comments.
ReframeIt's community is mostly organized around groups. Currently, most of the active groups on the service are clustered around political topics, but the company also envisions school or college classes to use the tool for reading and annotating texts online.
Competition
ReframeIt's closest competitor is clearly Diigo, which has a more extensive feature set and also puts more emphasis on social bookmarking and discovery.
If you are mostly interested in sharing annotations, Reframe It is a perfectly good and easy to use solution, especially if you just want to share those annotations with a relatively small group of friends, colleagues, or classmates. If you need more advanced features, however, Diigo represents a better solution, especially if you consider that ReframeIt only represents a sub-set of Diigo's functionality.
Our main complaint with the service is that the browser extension does not allow you to access your social network and past comments without having to go to ReframeIt's web site.
Overall, however, we were impressed with the user interface design and functionality of both ReframeIt's site and browser extension.
For a quick look at how ReframeIt's interface works, here is the company's introduction video:
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Looks like a baby Diigo. It will be interesting to see what will be its user base in the coming months in such fierce competition between similar types of services.
I installed the plugin in Firefox. It is certainly light weight and fast.
Disclosure: I work for Tynt (www.tynt.com) a player in this market as well.
I am wondering what the readers of RWW think would be the 'killer' feature for this type of solution? There are many circling around this market, and there seems to be a strong underlying desire to communicate this way, yet the initial adoption of most players here isn't knocking anyone's socks off. What's missing?
Trailfire also exists. I use Diigo and love it. I automatically copy my bookmarks to delicious too, but like Diigo for its annotating, highlighting, etc. functionality. If you want to know more about why I like Diigo, I wrote about it on my blog.