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Ten days after Google's Sidewiki was accused of lifting features from annotation startup Reframe It, the little company is striking back. In a video interview with Reframe It CEO Bobby Fishkin, ReadWriteWeb learned why this 15-person team thinks they've got a fighting shot at besting the search Goliath.
The idea for Reframe It comes from Fishkin's days at Yale spent pouring over scholarly annotations of Shakespeare. The CEO launched the company to capture this spirit of intelligent discourse and expose it to the wider web community. Today, in addition to sharing Sidewiki's features of basic web annotations and notes, Reframe It also offers enhanced social features such as comment sharing via email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed. Other interesting features include enhanced privacy settings, comment feeds, embedable widgets, search term tracking and perhaps the most groundbreaking feature - what Fishkin calls "branded community comments".
Communities and publishers will soon invite users to contribute to relevant Reframe It conversations in roving groups across the web. One of Fishkin's earliest partners is UK-based financial community Interactive Investor. In addition to helping Interactive Investor generate real time comments on stocks and market indicators within its own site, Reframe It also helps the company monetize group conversations even when they're on external pages. Through community-specific sidebar advertising, Fishkin has found a way to generate revenue for publishers outside of the confines of a domain. As feeds cannibalize advertising revenue, new revenue generation like Reframe It becomes an increasing need for publishers. To test the service visit reframeit.com.
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Hey Dana you post here such an interesting as well as very nice post, i appreciate this.. The video is really very nice, in video i got so much of information.. This is really a very nice idea to Make the Money..
What a surprise. An anti-Google article on a Microsoft sponsored website. Original.
So, what everybody seems to be missing here, is that ReframeIt intends to (or already does) show ads next to my site - competing with my Adsense ads without my having a say what's being advertised?
No thanks. I understand they need to make money somehow, but this model is 'FAIL'.
You can keep your stinkin ads. Until Sidewiki starts showing ads, I'll go with them instead. Less annoying, and much more classy than how this ReframeIt bunch has gone about the whole situation. I never heard of them before Sidewiki.
Hey Guys,
a)I wouldn't say this is an anti-Google article, I just think it's cool you can create roving groups. ie. We could all go to the Reframe It site and comment as a RWW group if we wanted.
b)Reframe It's ads are the ones that a community chooses to put up. So if RWW wanted to link to a related report while looking at a real-time article, we could.