In a world where one of the most common applications on Facebook is Super Poke, I don’t hold out much hope when a new one crosses my path. That’s why I was so surprised when I came upon CommentAnywhere.

CommentAnywhere is a collaborative markup tool that allows you to graffiti the web and share your markup with your friends.

Comment Anywhere?

Before I rave about how entertaining this product was to use, first I need to say that I wasn’t able to actually test it due to some error involving my privacy settings. They seem to know that this is an issue, and after playing around with it for about 15 minutes and setting my search privacy to public, I decided that the problem might be a little more complex than just my Facebook arrangement.

No matter, lets look at the idea itself.

What I liked about the concept was that it made sharing links more dynamic. CommentAnywhere lets you annotate any web page that you visit with text, pictures or video and send it to people in your Facebook network. It seems like a natural addition to everyone’s favorite social OS. It’s like being able to take your Wall with you as you travel the Internet.

To make sure that you can control what you are sharing, CommentAnywhere allows you to select which network you want to disseminate your annotations to. A better arrangement would be to make these privacy features more fine grained. Many people only belong to one or two very large networks, and wouldn’t really like for everyone to see their social commentary on the webosphere.

You can see the most recent comments from you and your friends either from the CommentAnywhere homepage (which you can access from the toolbar) or from inside Facebook. Your annotations can also appear in your news feed, which acts as a combination marketing tool for CA and an easy way to publicize your web-ventures.

The biggest thing standing in the way of mass adoption of a system like this is that it requires that you install a toolbar. Many people have a hard time giving up browser real estate and you have to be all the more valuable to overcome this inertia. Second, it assumes that people have a lot to say about a webpage. So much to say, in fact, that they need to put little review bubbles all over it for their friends to gawk at.

Most people experience the web passively, and while it would be really interesting to see what your friends think about a page I don’t know how many people will take the time to do it. What could be interesting is if they had a general “review” option. That way, if someone comes across something funny or interesting they could add a blanket review (or even a blank review) to the page and send it as a bookmark to their friends. Systems like StumbleUpon have done really well using this as their model.

Web 2.0 Roundup

This application is better looking, more useful and a great deal more likely to be successful than most of the Facebook apps that I come across. Still, the biggest hurdle for them is to make it dead simple for people to add reviews. Assuming that most real people are interested in analyzing web pages is a bad call, despite what the tech punditry will tell you. I think there is a happy median between detailed analysis and simple bookmarking that this product could fill, finding that balance will be their challenge.

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