Reframe It 1

This idea seems flawed in a number of ways. First issue is that the monetization strategy is to require users to pay for the ability to use the toolbar. This issue, plus the lack of public-facing way to share your annotations has the fatal consequence that users will get no recognition outside the microscopic walled garden. Even if that aspect in and of itself is okay for a particular user (which it probably won't be because the user profile of a person who likes to react in this way to content on the web includes establishing reputation) they cannot adequately evangelize the service. So beyond that, I don't think content creators are gonna like this tool being used at all, and probably won't subscribe just to see someone trashing their writing. It encourages people to focus on minutia when being critical about a blog article rather than digesting the entire thing and commenting broadly (and of course it has to because most blogs and news sources online already have the ability to comment on an entire post, so this tool would be completely undifferentiated if that were the intent). Snarky flamewars are likely to ensue, I can picture it now :p Finally, and this is the worst issue, in my opinion. It's a sidebar that takes over a huge portion of the screen. I thought we'd seen the last of sidebars circa 2002, but apparently not. While it could be argued that monitors are bigger now, SO many people have laptops (and cheap, teensy netbooks are gaining popularity...i know I want one :D) that resolution is still a problem. In the demo I saw, the presenter had to scroll left/right to even read the article that was annotated. That's a major fail right there.