WebNotes: Not Just Another Annotation Service (500 Invites Available)
There are any number of services that offer the ability to annotate Web pages or share finds with friends. So why spend time on WebNotes? Because it seems awfully serious about providing the types of features that allow professional researchers to do online research - and only those features.
What I noticed most about WebNotes were the features that weren't there, and quite frankly, weren't missed. And that focus on "being a pencil instead of a Swiss army knife" is what makes WebNotes worth a second look.
WebNotes doesn't seem terribly interested in social recommendations or popularity rankings. Where it does seem to have interest, however, is in allowing people to easily annotate and highlight Web pages - and share them with the people who matter to them.
Anyone who has spent a great deal of time doing research by sifting through printed materials will immediately notice that WebNotes offers the two most critical research tools for any bookworm: sticky notes and a highlighter. But it also offers a filing system that allows users to categorize notes and pages under topical areas, as well as the option to share your findings with others.
Unlike other overly complex systems, the tool is incredibly straightforward and easy to use. Once the WebNotes toolbar is installed, it's simple to begin adding sticky notes and highlighting pages. I was impressed with the responsiveness of the app and the ease of managing my sticky notes and highlights.
After you've finished adding notes, you have the option of saving the page for your own reference or sharing it with people via email or link. The best part? The users with whom you share pages don't need WebNotes installed to access your annotations. (To see an example of the annotations in action, take a look at this marked up ReadWriteWeb page.)
Not interested in installing another toolbar? Then the bookmarklet may be more your speed. Once you're logged into the system, the bookmarklet enables a similar set of features - sticky notes, highlighter, and filing - and provides you with access to all of the sticky notes and highlights for your particular pages, whether you saved them with the toolbar or the bookmarklet, at the office or at home.
For a closed beta, the product is pretty solid. I experienced some minor issues - like putting the bookmarklet toolbar away and having to restart my browser to get it to return. But in terms of functionality, the product worked exactly as promised.
Another minor issue I noticed - which likely has more to do with the underlying technology than the tools - was the inability to float sticky notes over embedded objects like videos and widgets. This was unfortunate but it wasn't a show stopper.
Finally, as a regular Skitch user, I found myself really wishing that WebNotes had a simple arrow tool or the ability to circle things. But again, those features would be nice to have - not necessary.
Clearly, the creators - a team of young MIT alumni - have already spent a fair amount of time doing their own research. And the app shows it. For people who use the Web for research this could prove to be a very interesting offering.
I've spent the better part of a week testing WebNotes. I continue to find new uses for it. And I continue to be impressed by how well it works. I'm going to keep using it to see if I can make it a permanent part of my workflow.
Interested in trying it for yourself? WebNotes is currently in closed beta, but we've managed to wrangle a few invites to the service. If you'd like to try it, be among the first 500 users to register for WebNotes using this link. Or visit WebNotes to see demos of the product in action.
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This sounds very interesting.
1) does it have tags? It looks in the screen views as if it is operating with nested folders. I would prefer tags, but well.
2) can it compete with Evernote? it seems like quite a hard task to take on Evernote, even though I do realize that its not exactly the same type of service.
I think it would be fair to say that Diigo is the most popular and mature web annotation tool on the market today. With over half a million registered users, It has been continuously refined over the past three years.
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So it would be helpful to compare any new entrant in the space to Diigo. If webnotes is aiming at serious web surfers, then I must say that side-by-side comparisons would show that Diigo is a much more powerful (and mature) tool. For example, Diigo provides rich tagging capability as well as folders for better information organization, and group annotation for better collaboration. Diigo automatically caches the page so it is always available to you. Diigo allows you to search the full-text of your collections, or just within your highlights. Diigo allows you to easily extract your research findings or publish them to blogs .....
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One could argue that webnotes' is simpler because of less features. Well, if you want real productivity, I should like to argue that it just falls far short of what Diigo enables. In addition, Diigo's rich functionality has been designed with painstaking care so that if you will be completely comfortable just using a subset of the features to begin with. For tools that are really simple, I would say delicious and google notebooks are hard to beat.
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Diigo team continues to dedicate itself to make Diigo the best tool for research productivity and knowledge sharing. (In the meantime, other web annotation tools such as fleck, i-lighter, jump knowledge, trailfire, etc have essentially stopped development or simply shut-down, to the best of my knowledge. )
@Wade, been a while since I saw you! Glad you took the time to comment.
Diigo is the leader in Social Annotations and the focus is on community and hence the impressive number of half a mil users.
I've been using Webnotes since I got an early beta invite and think its very solid technology and focuses on the individual need of a true researcher.
Webnotes has a sharing capability but that is not about annotating a page and sharing with your community like Diigo. I use Diigo as a complement to Delicio.us
I use webnotes for real work market research I want to share with my team where I can highlight or annotate a page and share it with a fellow researcher in the team.
Its true that many players in this space have shut down. Webnotes arrival will help revive this space.
I see the difference between Diigo and Webnotes as sharing content in a public community vs work/team collaboration setting. Both have merit but solve different problems for different segment of users.
How does it compare to Google Notebook? Clearly Google notebook doesn't allow notes on pages, but seems to have a similar interface.
@RobG you should try Yawas http://www.yawas.com
It's a firefox extension that stores your highlights inside your Google Bookmarks and recreates the highlights automatically whenever you revisit the pages you've highlighted. Plus, a little star notifies you when you have made highlights on that page, because sometimes they are not visible (e.g. you'd have to scroll down to see the highlights). Since it lives over Google Bookmarks, I'm not maintaining a server, and you can probably trust Google that they'll be longer in operation than newly funded companies.
@Wade:
We really appreciate Wade's comments on Mashable, Read Write Web, LouisGray.com, etc. At WebNotes, we have the utmost respect for Diigo and the social annotation tools they provide. They have a great product for consumers interested in social annotation and facilitate a wonderful intermediary service for those who wish to discuss articles and build communities around their annotations. We certainly wish them the best of luck as the endeavor to create greater value for their communities.
Before I begin my response to Wade's assertions, we should first realize that the annotation market is largely untapped. Web researchers make up far greater numbers than Diigo's 500k users, or the dwindling audiences of the other social annotation sites. A recent survey by Forbes and Gartner noted that over 60% of C-level executives got a majority of the information on which they base their decisions from the internet. Millions of researchers are currently surfing the web without a solution to fit their needs. Part of the problem is that they haven't yet found the right solution; the other part is that they haven't yet been educated about a better way to research. Here at WebNotes, we strongly believe that all annotation sites can greatly expand our respective market shares by increasing the education available to the public.
That said, we agree completely with Wade and believe that everyone should compare both Diigo and WebNotes. Use both and pick whichever one resonates with you. We are confident in our design choices and feel that there is most certainly value in simplicity, intuitive interfaces and ease of use. So how about it bloggers? Which do you prefer? Research analysts should do the same. Spread the word to your colleagues. Anyone who has ever needed to research online should view this as the perfect time to learn a better way to complete such a task.
Most of all, let us know what you like, what you need and what you hate. We are trying to make a product that is perfect for you and the louder you are, the better our products become.
Thanks for your help!
Ryan Damico
The reason diigo cant be used as a real research tool - like Zotero (I still dream about an online version of zotero - it would be the ultimate reference tool!) is that it fails in handling text. The "highligting" function is clumsy and not precise - and most important of all - you cant edit your "clips" in a rich text format editor! This is where many tools fail. Zotero have at least a function to save "snapshots" of pages in a structured way.
I havent evaluated WebNotes functionality yet - every time i trie to highligt a textblock i get a message about server timeout or unability to connect to server - but I suppose that is something temporary - so I cant see how the text editing functions works yet - bu I hope that Webnotes in comparision to Diigo takes the handling of your highlighted text serious and enable the user to edit the text in rich text format (which gives must-have optionality to add links etc)
Thank you!
Sebastian / masters student library & information science
Just to be more precise: what is really needed is a reference tool that can handle BOTH notes that keeps formatted web text formatted, as in google notes - AND adds value in form of organizing skills: tagging, categorizing, sticky notes - to the text editing. Does WebNotes have theese functions? Diigo have not.
@wade. Allow me to assure that i-Lighter is alive and well. Our development team continues to improve our core product and we are preparing to launch a unique sharing and collaboration platform. And from a business aspect(a rarity but a necessity) we continue to expand our Partner Program, providing customized solutions for strategic partners in education, media and SAAS.
I respect Diigo as a tool for serious researchers and welcome WebNotes to this illustrious group.
Marcy Hoffman
CEO
i-Lighter
Honestly I do not get why some seemingly smart MIT graduates would spend their coding skills developing an inferior me-too product. There are tons of better ideas out there -- ask me, I have quite a few myself!
How can you call new attempts to create an online reference tool a "mee-too"-product whem it doesnt exist any good online reference tool?
As i pointed out - Diigo is a great social bookmarking tool But it cant handle text and pictures in webclips - whioh is very important when it comes to an reference / bookmarking/ notetaking tool. I dont know if Webnotes can handle this, it doesnt work for me (there is some server error when trying to save highlights) but of course there is room on the market for tools like this. I almos find it strange there isnt more vendors on the marking trying to make services like this.
Right now the only acceptable reference tool is unfortenatly a local browser addon (Zotero) but Im looking forward for new comanys taking zotero-like skills online.
@rote, our server had a few hiccups this morning but is running smoothly now. I'd encourage you to try out our tools again and let us know how they fit into your workflow. I think you'll find our highlighter tool to be quite robust.
I have now tried Webnotes out and of course I shouldnt became so excited, now I´m dissapointed instead. This is a just another tool for hightlighting text on webpages and adding some sticky-note. But Nothing more. No notetaking (You cant edit your clips.) no formatting. Just plain txt. No tagging. It cant handle pictures in highlights.You can only highlight small portions of pages.
So.. it seems I still have to wait for the good online reference/bookmarking/note-tool. Maybe if Zotero goes online, if Google notes expand their organizing powers in the future (the integration to google bookmarks is on its way, so it doesnt seem to unbelieavable) or maybe Evernote is the directions to look for this.
Thanks to everyone for their positive mentions of Zotero, and how it would be the ultimate tool if it was online. In case you missed it, the latest version of Zotero does in fact sync to the cloud, so you can access your Zotero collection from anywhere, view it on your iPhone, etc. Zotero also creates "reports" from your notes and items saved, like WebNotes.
As Co-Director of Zotero I hereby declare a special unlimited time offer for RWW readers: unlimited invitations to try Zotero. (By the way, it's free and open source.)
@ Sudha: Diigo has much richer functionality for information organization and collaboration. Surely those are key parts of the research process.
To put it somewhat bluntly, Diigo can do everything webnotes offers plus a lot more, plus time-tested robustness. Punch me the next time you see me if I am wrong :)
@rote: Diigo does allow you to extract the annotations and edit them rich text editor. For example, once you annotated a page, try "blog this", you will see.
Yes, I second Dan, and want to offer unlimited invitations to try Diigo, as it has been the case for the past 3 years :)
And if you are a teacher, you can get a special premium account so you can get your students research, annotate, share and collaborate using Diigo in minutes ...
"Thanks to everyone for their positive mentions of Zotero, and how it would be the ultimate tool if it was online. In case you missed it, the latest version of Zotero does in fact sync to the cloud, so you can access your Zotero coll"
>>> As I said I like Zotero, but the syncing is not really fully functional yet. For example, it doesnt your snapshots of pages. But this is maybe something that is on its way? If so, It would be fantastic.
I dont mean to be agressive, so dont misunderstand me - but I have to ask ReadWriteWeb: If this a sponsored blog where you get paid to hype every webservice you write about? Why else would anyonw review this with "Because it seems awfully serious about providing the types of features that allow professional researchers to do online research - and only those features."
Here I think there is room for an explanation from the author. Exactly what does this service that makes it a serious alternative for professional researchers?? Webnotes save textblocks. Not links. Not images. Just txt. You cant edit the textblocks. dont tag them. You highlight text and save in folders with an URL. Thats all. Please tell me what in this makes it to a serious alternative for proffesional researchers?
Diigo really is the best , combining tagging and annotation seamlessly.
Nice tool.. Was looking for one like this.