

Awesome Highlighter (YC summer 08) - gabrielleydon
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/22/awesome-highlighter-isawesome/

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god
Lets test it:

<http://awurl.com/pspxuq96279>

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cawel
Nice tool.

As I understand from Techcrunch, the revenue stream would come from selling
their "awesome highlighter" product to media sites. The incentives for media
sites to buy it?

\- nice feature for their users to share highlights

\- possibility to survey what their users find interesting

I believe there is some revenue potential in this. It just strikes me how
simple business ideas can be. Once again, value is the key, not complexity.

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wallflower
User annotations help make the user feel they are part of the
community/creative process. Walled gardens like NYTimes might be scared
(remember ThirdVoice) to let the public annotate their content - highlighting
is a trojan horse to overlaying user annotations and co-opting their precious
content. If I were the NYTimes, I'd be scared to sign any revenue-sharing
contract unless it specifically prohibited later, more sophisticated
annotations.

One of the most-popular sites in Japan is a clever site that lets anyone
comment directly on a video, literally.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Nico_Douga>

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maxklein
And on testing it, it does not even work. I tried yahoo.com and it keeps
popping up this message box telling me there is a limit of 2000 characters,
when I'm selecting small paragraphs. So YC funded a startup with an idea that
has been tried many times over and with a product that just does not work?
Hmm, somebodies gonna lose $10.000. Not saying who, but somebody....

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webwright
Evaluating a first release like this is kinda silly. It's a road, not a
destination. For a v1 (or a beta, which is what this really is), you're better
off evaluating the road...

Regarding "tried many times over"... You mean like web search was before
Google? Or MP3 players before the iPod? Or photosharing before Flickr?

I'm not saying I'm convinced this idea is a winner, but come on... Predicting
failure for a startup is so laughably easy that I don't know why you'd bother,
unless you just wanted to feel smug.

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wave
Congratulation to hooande. I remember when he mentioned it
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174900>

Awesome Highlighter uses frames to view other websites and some websites
prevent their pages to be viewed in someone else's frameset (if (top != self)
top.location.href = 'example.com'). There is no way I know of to disable this
and need to respect their wish not be viewed in frameset.

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grag
Actually they appear to be caching the pages, which is how they are able to
detect what is highlighted (otherwise it would be cross domain scripting). So
they could just have their caching script strip out that JS and problem
solved.

I image that page caching could lead to problems with some sites though. I
wanted to do something similar for a project I was working on but scrapped the
idea because I couldn't get around the whole cross domain scripting issue, and
caching just introduces a host of other problems.

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maxklein
I might be wrong, but I seem to remember seeing this same idea sometime in the
web 1.0 bubble. It failed then, and since then, there have been several
attempts to revive this very same business, and it fails each time. So why did
YC go and fund a business that just does not seem to work?

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nostrademons
The environment changes. Online video sharing was tried several times during
Web 1.0, but didn't catch on until YouTube in 2005 - because in the meantime,
broadband and cell-phone video and social networking had penetrated millions
of households. Same with social bookmarking - anyone remember Links?

The fact that others have tried the same idea and failed is probably a bad
indication, but it's not a hard rule that _this_ attempt will fail.

~~~
maxklein
Yes, but get this: If someone had told me in 2000 that I could watch streaming
video in good quality without any pauses and without needing any special
computer or internet, I would have screamed excitedly: HOW? I would have
WANTED it, but unfortunately, the reality of online video back then sucked
bigtime.

If someone had told me in 2001 there was a way to easily annote webpages and
share them with my friends, I'd have yawned. BORING!

Some concepts are just boring, and technology improvement does not change it.
Those companies failed because people just don't have a need to mark pages. I
can just copy and paste the text into emails.

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nostrademons
But say you take Twitter as an example. If someone had told me back in 1995
that I could send 130-character text messages to all my friends over the web,
I'd have said "So?". Now I've got a bunch of friends nagging me, "Are you on
Twitter yet?" (I'm not, but I do get nagged about it fairly often.)

Technology doesn't just change what's possible, it changes what people want.
The reason there's demand for something like Twitter is because now _everyone_
is online, nearly 24/7, and so the value of an online service that tells you
what your friends are doing has gone up significantly.

You may be right - actually, from a numbers perspective, you probably are. But
if I had a few million to invest and the chance to blow $15K on something like
AwesomeHighlighter, I'd think there was _enough_ of a possibility of success
to make it worthwhile. People are reading more online, and their reading is
much more participatory. That's a different environment than in 99/00.

~~~
maxklein
The only potential I see is in the tiny url service part of it. But I was only
aware of this AFTER testing it out. It should be emphasised more:

Create a short url for a page - AND mark the parts you find interesting. Tiny
url but with a marker.

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webwright
Check out:

<http://blog.linebuzz.com/>

They do the same thing without a plugin/bookmarklet.

I dunno about most folks, but I have to have some pretty serious pain and/or
desire to add clutter to my browser.

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bayareaguy
How does this differ significantly from Third Voice?
<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/04/42803>

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ctkrohn
I love the name. It's simple, memorable, and instantly identifies what the
site does. A very refreshing change from the plague of generic Web 2.0-ish
non-word names.

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noel_gomez
The bookmarklet does not work for me in Safari 3.1.1 The toolbar shows up and
then disappears. Has anyone else tried it in Safari?

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nirmal
I have and the same thing happens for me.

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shaunxcode
They should definitely set cursor:pointer on the color selector for the ffox
plugin.

