Activeweave

Activeweave, Inc.

Activeweave's BlogRovR running on Firefox
Developer(s)	Activeweave, Inc.
Initial release	November 2006
Written in	Java JavaScript XUL
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Type	Firefox Extension, IE Plugin
License	Freeware, Proprietary

Activeweave, Inc. was a Silicon Valley-based startup, operating in the attention management and social web arenas. It was acquired in April 2008 by Buzzlogic, Inc.^[1]

Background

Activeweave's original positioning, through the Stickis service, revolves around and extends the notion of social annotation for web sites. Web annotations were pioneered in 1999 by the company Third Voice, with a service allowing its users to:

Author comments and tie those comments to any web page.
Have their own comments as well as others' be automatically retrieved for display (in a fashion similar to Post-it notes) and reading, whenever visiting any annotated page.

Lacking the filtering mechanism which would allow users to select whose annotations they would see, Third Voice came to be perceived as intrusive, spam-like graffiti, and consequently was fought by site owners,^[2] and largely ignored by users overwhelmed by the amount of public commentary on popular sites. For this, it ceased operation in 2001.^[3]

One of Activeweave's significant departures from Third Voice's approach was to base the sharing and visibility of annotations on an underlying social network. Activeweave also innovated in terms of user experience by ensuring annotations were displayed in an unobtrusive manner, not interfering with the visited sites:

No screen space was reserved or used by the service's browser add-on on pages with no annotations.
When annotations from connected users are present, only a small (and re-sizable) tray showing annotation abstracts is shown.
The full annotations are only shown when the user selects an abstract.

Subsequently, Activeweave released BlogRovR, that built on the same technology but made the system read-only, with annotations being supplied implicitly by blog posts relevant to the web page being viewed by users.

History

Activeweave was co-founded in late 2005^[4] by software entrepreneurs Jean Sini and Marc A. Meyer. In early 2006, the company raised a round of seed investment funding from business angels, including Esther Dyson and Eric Di Benedetto.^[5]

Technology

Activeweave develops a contextual and social web overlay technology. In conjunction with a traditional web service, Activeweave leverages the add-on it built for the Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer browsers to provide its users with always-on, in-place access to information relevant to the page they are currently viewing.

Services

Activeweave offers consumers two distinct services, both currently in public beta:

Stickis, launched in November 2006,^[6]^[7]^[8] primarily focuses on tight-knit communities, and lets its users collaborate by annotating web pages as they browse. It also enables users to discover, read and comment on their peers’ annotations, either in-place or through a searchable, centralized repository that exposes the shared accumulated knowledge to participants in a form equivalent to a multi-author blog.

BlogRovR, launched in April 2007,^[9] helps individuals manage the attention they pay to massive amounts of information hosted by blogs and mainstream media. Thus it participates in stemming the potential attention crisis caused by the accelerated growth in the quantity of content available for consumption online.

BlogRovR exploits the same underlying technology as Stickis to continuously overlay stories, contextually relevant to the web page currently being viewed, right into the browser. It allows each individual user to select blogs and mainstream media sources they trust, and automatically picks relevant stories from those sources, as well as closely related sources. This allows users to reduce the time they spend systematically reading blog posts, while ensuring that those same posts will be delivered, precisely when they are relevant to the material currently being viewed, thus more likely to be meaningful and useful.

Awards

In June 2007, BlogRovR gained the status of recommended Firefox add-on. BlogRovR was also nominated in 2007 as a finalist to the Webware 100 in the browsing category.

References

External links

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