Regarding "tried many times over"... You mean like web search was before Google? Or MP3 players before the iPod? Or photosharing before Flickr?
I'm not saying I'm convinced this idea is a winner, but come on... Predicting failure for a startup is so laughably easy that I don't know why you'd bother, unless you just wanted to feel smug.
I found it buggy, too. But there's one thing I've learned from the software business: I have no idea what a given thing is worth, and whether it can be sold. I almost fell on the floor when that calendar company sold their (cough, cough) "technology" for some 200K. Xobni's widget got an offer for 20m or something like that. Wtf?
So, yeah. Don't be surprised if a semi-functional, 1000-times-already-done, text highlighter pulls in a couple million. I don't get it either.
Anyone know how they are calculating their limit and/or why it's there?
Awesome Highlighter uses frames to view other websites and some websites prevent their pages to be viewed in someone else's frameset (if (top != self) top.location.href = 'example.com'). There is no way I know of to disable this and need to respect their wish not be viewed in frameset.
I image that page caching could lead to problems with some sites though. I wanted to do something similar for a project I was working on but scrapped the idea because I couldn't get around the whole cross domain scripting issue, and caching just introduces a host of other problems.
The fact that others have tried the same idea and failed is probably a bad indication, but it's not a hard rule that this attempt will fail.
If someone had told me in 2001 there was a way to easily annote webpages and share them with my friends, I'd have yawned. BORING!
Some concepts are just boring, and technology improvement does not change it. Those companies failed because people just don't have a need to mark pages. I can just copy and paste the text into emails.
As I understand from Techcrunch, the revenue stream would come from selling their "awesome highlighter" product to media sites. The incentives for media sites to buy it?
- nice feature for their users to share highlights
- possibility to survey what their users find interesting
I believe there is some revenue potential in this. It just strikes me how simple business ideas can be. Once again, value is the key, not complexity.
One of the most-popular sites in Japan is a clever site that lets anyone comment directly on a video, literally.
They do the same thing without a plugin/bookmarklet.
I dunno about most folks, but I have to have some pretty serious pain and/or desire to add clutter to my browser.
