ReadWriteWeb

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.

Web annotation is a sexy and increasingly crowded space in the market. As in any such pool, the amount of elbow-rubbing between individuals and similarity between products can lead to suspicion of theft.

Annotation startup Reframe It, a 14-person team, claims that Google's hot new product Sidewiki crosses the line between competitive innovation and IP infringement. And with a few Googlers caught with their hands in Reframe It's cookie jar, there might be some validity to this claim.

Kutano, a browser-based Twitter client that also aggregates comments on Twitter about the website a user is currently visiting, just launched the first client for Google's Sidewiki project. Sidiwiki allows users who have a special version of the Google Toolbar installed to annotate any web page and comment on any blog post. These comments, however, are normally only visible to users who also use Google's toolbar, but Google also allows third parties to access this data. Kutano is the first company to make use of the Sidewiki API to aggregate these comments and annotations.

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.