Alex King, Director of Marketing for WebNotes, an web-based annotation product for researchers was kind enough to talk to us about what makes his version of “Social Annotation” different and what it’s like to be an entrepreneur on the web.

Webnotes

At first glance, it may seem that web annotation has been done before, but we are really innovating in a different space than most other services. You’ll notice that almost all of the other companies (Fleck, Diigo, ReFrameIt, i-Lighter, etc) are all in the “Social Annotation” space, meaning that the primary use of their product is to create a sticky note on a webpage that other random people can view and also make additional comments on.

Most of these products are not exactly the highest of quality, and very few of them actually offer any sort of organizational structure that researchers need in order to do their work. Don’t get me wrong: social annotation services have a great goal, and one that requires a huge positive network externality to become valuable. We wish these guys the best of luck in creating that social value for their users.

At the other end are the serious research competitors such as Zotero and EndNote. These are the high quality, big players when it comes to high level research, but they suffer their share of problems too. First, they aren’t web based so all research is stored on your local computer (terribly inconvenient for many people who work at home or on the road) Second, annotation is more of an afterthought than anything; users have to download a snapshot of any webpage they visit, and only after they download it can they start marking it up.

We allow you to mark up any web page instantly, creating a seamless workflow for our users. Third, there is typically no element of sharing, whereas we allow users to email annotations or generate a permalink to share with colleagues. The real benefit of working with one of these products is their great citation management infrastructure. If you have the need to generate bibliographies in any one of 30,000 formats, go for these guys, you won’t regret it.

To make a long story short, we straddle this delicate but potentially very lucrative line between hardcore researchers who need to generate thousands of bibliographies for published papers and home consumers who need social bookmarking/annotating features. We have a team of MIT engineers working to make a product as valuable as possible to this niche.

To demonstrate this point, there is a local Boston consulting firm that uses WebNotes and has provided us with some great feedback. I was helping one of their analysts research geothermal energy resources and she instantly loved the highlighter function, but what really got her hooked was when she needed to summarize all of her research for her boss. She was going to go copy and paste all of her annotations into a Word document when I just told her to “Publish” the folder with her annotations. She gave me a bit of a confused look, but did as I said and saw how all of her notes became aggregated into a PDF for her to give to her superior. This was EXACTLY what she needed and reaffirmed what we are trying to do with our product…needless to say, it was a great feeling for me. Since then, she has proceeded to advertise for us to a lot of her colleagues.

Entrepreneurship

One of the most difficult things that we’ve had to learn to do is really prioritize our feature set. There are an unlimited amount of feature requests, but only X number of programmers, Y amount of money and Z amount of time. Figuring out the appropriate call for action takes a lot of work.

Along these lines, some of our competitors try to offer everything and the kitchen sink, probably because each of their users will request little features that can be implemented quickly, but just as quickly detract from the overall product. We’ve made a very conscious effort to create a simple and intuitive interface that doesn’t get in people’s way, and instead maximizes their productivity. Because of this, we’ve had to say no quite a bit, but we feel that our product benefits in the end.

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