Hacker News Reader

Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

I recall some efforts to make a social browser, where people visiting a web page could leave comments on it and read comments from others.

IIRC (and I fear I don't RC), the web industry hated this idea because they couldn't control and monetize the conversation around their content. Of course, we now do this exact thing with sites like Slash Dot, Digg, and Hacker News, only there is this step of going to the social site to see the popular links.

If you go to a page and wonder what HN has to say about it, you have to do a search for the URL by yourself. (Perhaps there is a browser add-on that does this?)

Taking comments to a place where you could annotate the document and not just discuss the page as a whole is the next step for sites like HN. Of course, there is the pesky problem of the sites hating this and using every legal tool in their arsenal to prevent you from presenting this as an interface.

View on HN

I made a very early version of something like this in 2002 using a loophole that allowed me to frame content in such a way that the original site was visible in an iframe with avatars and speech balloons for the visitors floating over the iframe. Unfortunately the next release of the major browsers closed that loophole (because it could be used in bad ways just as easily as it could be used in good ways). That was a real bummer, I really liked the idea of 'meeting' people on other websites if you both visited through the portal.

Maybe with the current generation of browsers there is another way to achieve the same effect.

On websites with lots of visitors this would likely not work but then you might limit the visible entries to those from some slice through the population based on certain criteria (location or other demographic data).

There are quite a few efforts out there. Someone has already mentioned rbutr (actually my personal project) - you can view it in action without the plugin by just adding rbutr.com/ to the front of any URL, eg: http://rbutr.com/http://www.realfarmacy.com/johns-hopkins-sc...

However rbutr isn't really what you've described here. What you've described is either

https://hypothes.is/ or

http://fiskkit.com or

https://factlink.com/

Oh, also, Hypothes.is had previously put together this spreadsheet on Google Docs which lists all of the previous efforts to make web annotation applications. It hasn't been kept up to date though so I keep a local one up to date now, just in case this is ever lost: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aujm_HldNh4WdHJ...

Hey Sean, Dan Whaley from Hypothes.is here. We would absolutely love your edits and updates! Happy to collaborate on this. You can email me ... dwhaley@h...

One similar project was _why's mousehole: https://github.com/evaryont/mousehole and hoodwink.d https://github.com/robbyrussell/hoodwinkd

How did this hoodwink.d worked?

It's been a while, but as I recall, when it started it involved a proxy to inject the client code into pages, and a hosts file mapping that pointed an invalid FQDN ___._ to the backend, whose IP you had to get from someone who already knew it. Then, once you were in, there was also a karma system which limited the capabilities of low-scored users, and karma was hard to earn.

All told, it gave a strong impression of being less a web annotation system, and more a secret club for soi-disant cool kids. I didn't stay in long; a couple of days, no more.

That's interesting and strange. Thank you.

http://rbutr.com is a contradiction-focused social plugin for linking pages together, I'm not sure how widely used.

You can see in the Chrome store how many active users the plugin has (which is only one part of what rbutr does): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rbutr/ocnieghejikn...

So it says about 10,300 active plugin users.

A more appropriate plugin for the OP's question is Hypothes.is. They're open source, non-profit and have raised over $1.5 million. They have about 7,300 users according to the chrome webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypothesis-web-pdf...

Now that you mention it, it would be great to have a browser plugin that would gather links to several discussion sites (HN, metafilter, the subreddits, etc.).

Here is a Chrome plugin for HN discussions: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discus...

There is https://hypothes.is/ which provides this additional layer as a browser plugin. And I vaguely remember that there were others.

There have been many such systems. I built one in the early 2000s and tried to raise money around it, to no avail. At the time there were several commercial competitors, including one well-funded venture called ThirdVoice. Wikipedia has some information on the history of the genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation .

There where a bunch of us trying it. We created a corporate version for web site annotation and collaboration. We lost our best chance for funding just as the market cratered.

Having seen several more since then I don't think the market is there for it. People still rather print/screen capture/write an email/annotate PDF versions, about changes in websites rather than use an annotation tool on the page it seems.

> People still rather print/screen capture/write an email/annotate PDF versions, about changes in websites rather than use an annotation tool on the page it seems.

The reason seems fairly obvious - printing/screen capture/PDFs are off-line. Permanent and under user's control. Internet based annotations are inherently unstable - one way today, different tomorrow, completely gone next week. I always found the concept a great thing for sharing thoughts with people, but a terrible one for personal notes.

I don't think I put it in the right context. Personal notes wasn't what I was aiming for, but collaboration around content.

Zotero covers a lot of this but it's designed as an individual not a social experience. https://www.zotero.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com