ReadWriteWeb

Giving and receiving design feedback can be difficult, as bulleted lists of comments and screenshots are often labor intensive and miss the context of the complete design. To make this easier, Bay Area interaction design and design strategy firm ZURB just released Bounce, a free and easy to use tool that can capture screenshots of any site and then allows you to annotate these images. You can also upload your own images and annotate them in the tool's web interface.

For many folks, Memorial Day weekend was a chance to bask in the fresh summer sun and put some color in their cheeks, but for a hardy band of indoor hackers, it brought a chance to put some color in your Tweets! Tantek Çelik and I were two of the 50-odd developers invited to the Twitter Annotations Hackfest, and we used our preview access to that upcoming API to demo our proposal for applying the Web's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard to enhance plain ol' Tweets with color, fonts and graphics.

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.

ZURB, a well-known Bay Area design and consulting firm that has worked with the likes of Facebook, eBay and Britney Spears, decided to release one of the tools it built internally to annotate web designs to the public a short while ago. Notable is completely web based and works best in Firefox - though the company also released an iPhone app that makes working on iPhone app designs easier as well. In the browser, you simply surf to a site, hit the Notable button, and a little menu will pop up that lets you annotate any part of the web page or see the source code of the page and annotate this as well.

Over the years, numerous companies have offered services that allowed users to annotate web pages. Now, with a new project called Sidewiki, Google is going to join the fray as well. Sidewiki, which will be distributed with a special version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer, allows users to publicly annotate any page on the web. Entries will then be sorted by an algorithm that filters out low-quality comments and moves the most interesting items to the top.