If you need any help with it or just want to chat privately, please drop me a mail – peterk at yaytrail.com

Peter, you’re absolutely right about the consistent rehash of similar concepts, actions, and interfaces in the current popular annotation systems (I consider CommentPress something altogether different). I’ll definitely be downloading the YayTrail extension at some point soon based on the description in your penultimate paragraph, and I’ll give it a thorough eval (understanding its limited preview development stage). If it truly is something new and exciting, I’ll certainly do my best to make sure people know about it.

Tom’s asked me to reply to you since I’m the ‘techie guy’ at YayTrail

I think it’ll be up to users to determine what kind of service suits them best, but I can point out how YayTrail differs from the services in your post.

Chiefly, it’s interface. All of these services rely on two approaches – a sidebar in the browser or a layer on top of the webpage. The user’s content lives in one or other of these spaces. It’s the same approach that Third Voice initiated…all of these services are basically rehashing that core concept.

We love the idea of a universal, cross-website content platform, a way to ‘mash up’ sites. But we disliked the implementations in these kinds of services. We didn’t like that there’s a big sidebar taking up screen real estate. We didn’t like the idea of sticky-notes living on layers on top of – and often obscuring – the original page. We think these characteristics have kind of helped give annotation a bit of a bad name and limited more casual adoption and traction.

So we decided to make a tool that strips away the things we didn’t like about existing services. To do this, we’ve worked on technology that allows the user to enhance pages in-line. The user’s content lives as a native part of the page, not ‘out-of-line’ in a side bar or non-native content layer. In the ‘first layer’ as you put it. We think that gives a different level of control and power to the user, gives a different value to their content, and rids us of the heavyweight UI elements of previous services in one swoop. We let people share their enhancements with others…so you can follow people of interest, and their enhancements get merged into your view of the web. We don’t see everyone’s stuff, just the folks you want, which we think’s important when you’re giving this level of control to change and modify pages.

We’re still really raw, but that’s our vision. You can try out our preview if you wish, with FireFox. We simply think people have been recycling the core basis Third Voice started for too long now, we think one can do much better now with the browser tech and so on available today…so that’s what we’re trying to do

Yaytrail is a tool that ushers in the era of the open and personal web.

It’s an innovation that allows you to edit content anywhere on the web! Using Yaytrail, any webpage becomes an open and social space where you and your friends can add knowledge, opinions, ideas and insights, providing a definitive and personalised web experience that is created and edited by your peers. Everywhere you go, the collective intelligence of your friends will follow you!

Yaytrail is simple – just click and type anywhere you want to make a personal stamp on the web.

Yaytrail aggregates the trail of content created by you and your friends to help you discover new and interesting webpages and content, putting you in touch with what’s hot right now on the web among your friends.

By the way, I have found Diigo to be the most useful tool since RSS feeds for discovering new tools that challenge my understanding of literacy or just delight (http://www.triptico.co.uk/flashFiles/randomSixteen/randomSixteen.html).

The quality of Profhacker is remarkable!

tbf

Diggo annoyed me in their initial days and I’m not sure that I’m ready to forgive them and I don’t know that I want to feed the Google beast anymore of my life.

That being said, I do think that these tools can be very useful for a lot of people.