Annotating the web
When I wrote my piece about Community Notes, I became interested in the idea of open web annotation. After a light research sesh, I found it was an idea that a lot of people had:
- _why’s hoodwink.d (2005–2009)
- Google SideWiki (2009–11)
- Reframe It (2008-present): still alive, but shifted focus to an enterprise polling solution.
- hypothes.is (2011-present): have found success by pivoting into the academic space.
- Genius.com (2012-present): yes, this is the same lyrics site you’re thinking of.
You’ll notice that many of these products spun up in the 2000s, a largely pre-social media time when the web was much more open. You’ll also notice that many of them failed out of the annotation space.
I think the reasons for failure are pretty obvious:
- Scale: even then, the world wide web was large, and the number of pages with one or more public annotations on it would be a tiny, tiny fraction of the space. The only real way for this to work is if discoverability is baked into the platform (ie. a link aggregator like reddit for sites with annotations). And that would never happen because of…
- Walled gardens: Social media platforms have little incentive to link to third-party content that would take users outside their own ecosystem.
But that doesn’t make the concept not worth exploring.
Twitter’s missed opportunity
Many, many people have commented on the missed opportunity of Twitter operating as a protocol, including Jack Dorsey himself. Most of these arguments called for a decentralized platform where online discourse could take place, citing the importance of free/unmoderated speech.
To be honest, I never connected with this vision. And now that bluesky has been made into reality, I still don’t understand the value-add of Twitter being decentralized — I mean, mastodon exists and it’s functionally the same. Sure, these platforms are decentralized but still very much contained.
Then I read about Twitter Annotations, an experimental feature that allowed developers to attach any metadata to tweets (eg. a tweet about a movie could have annotations for the movie’s title, rating, and showtimes). Effectively a global commenting system — and this, I can get behind.
How could we implement this (in an ideal world)?
In the spirit of Spring ’83, I started to think about what I want from the Internet. If the constraints of existing platforms didn’t exist, what would be my ideal web annotation system?
What if users could “graffiti” web pages, like a live chat between the note-taker and anyone actively on that page? What if users could toggle between viewing the original page, and the annotated version?
I’m reminded of classroom overhead projectors, and have to acknowledge the nostalgia factor at play here. Still, it excites me. It’s collaborative, educational, contextual, and most importantly, accessible.
But as I say this, I know what I’m conceptualizing here would probably be too complex for my twitter-addicted brain. (follow me? https://x.com/anjali_shriva)
I leave you with this: A true internet town square should have never been confined to one platform. Perhaps the true town square is the web itself. Or perhaps it is something that’s yet to be built.
(This call to action feels very flat. I hope I come back and edit this once I have something better.)
