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.
The idea for Reframe It comes from Fishkin’s days at Yale spent pouring over scholarly annotations of Shakespeare. The CEO launched the company to capture this spirit of intelligent discourse and expose it to the wider web community. Today, in addition to sharing Sidewiki’s features of basic web annotations and notes, Reframe It also offers enhanced social features such as comment sharing via email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed. Other interesting features include enhanced privacy settings, comment feeds, embedable widgets, search term tracking and perhaps the most groundbreaking feature – what Fishkin calls “branded community comments”.
Communities and publishers will soon invite users to contribute to relevant Reframe It conversations in roving groups across the web. One of Fishkin’s earliest partners is UK-based financial community Interactive Investor. In addition to helping Interactive Investor generate real time comments on stocks and market indicators within its own site, Reframe It also helps the company monetize group conversations even when they’re on external pages. Through community-specific sidebar advertising, Fishkin has found a way to generate revenue for publishers outside of the confines of a domain. As feeds cannibalize advertising revenue, new revenue generation like Reframe It becomes an increasing need for publishers. To test the service visit reframeit.com.
