A Quick Look at the WebNotes beta

I was invited to join the WebNotes beta last week and I’ve been kicking it around for a few days now. If you’re looking for an interesting take on research or online collaboration, this tool is definitely worth a look.

Oh, and before I forget, I have 10 beta invites to give away – just leave a comment below.

WebNotes lets you leave your mark on web pages. You can add little yellow stickies and/or highlight text. Then your marked up pages are organized in WebNote folders for future reference. For instance, my primary use of this is marking up interesting pages that I might want to revisit and blog – thus I have an “@blog” folder in WebNotes to store those.

All this magic is implemented with a toolbar, either as a native plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer or with a bookmarklet for other browsers.

Both generally work well, especially the Firefox toolbar. I’ve been using the bookmarklet a lot in Chrome this week and found that it does have an odd tendency to sometimes just stop functioning. If I delete and re-add the shortcut then things are cool. I’m trying to figure out how to reliably repeat it and then I’ll log a bug with the WebNotes folks.

Another nice feature is the ability to share a marked up page. For instance, earlier today I was looking at some Windows Mobile software. I want to try it out and potentially blog about it so I highlighted some bits and a sticky to remind myself what my questions might be. Here is a shared permalink to it. Cool, eh?

Note: No social features! This is an application that knows what it does well and stays focused on just that. Sure, you can share pages by link or email, but no need to try to form groups and generate more social noise. No voting up or karma farming — just research. Personally, I think that’s a good call. Not every web application needs a social component…

Finally, if you’re on a machine without the toolbar or bookmarklet you can still get to your saved items by logging into the WebNotes site and going to “My WebNotes.” From there you can see all of your sites and their annotations and links to get back to them directly.

My only minor kvetch is with the organization system. Organizing by folder is definitely simple and intuitive, but I wouldn’t mind an option to do things by tags instead (or as well).

I’m curious about the business side of this… I sent a note off to my contact and he responded a bit vaguely about features aimed at professional and enterprise users. I look forward to see where that goes and how it works out.

Give it a shot, I think you’ll find it worth the time.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Browser Related Notes: Evernote / Safari / Google Toolbar
2. More Social Sharing With Google Reader
3. Yahoo Bookmarking Updates
4. Firefox 3.5 beta 4 Out
5. Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta 3