Singapore Entrepreneurs

SharedCopy, our local web 2.0 start-up is making waves in the media. Already featured in the famous TechCrunch and Folksonomy, they are once again making headlines in the famous Wall Street Journal in an article A Time for Sharing: More Web Sites Encourage Talk Back — But Not With Everyone by Jeremy Wagstaff. Here are some highlights from that article.

A lot of people have asked this question about SharedCopy. They felt that it resemble a start-up in the web 1.0 era called ThirdVoice. In that era, ThirdVoice crashed. This article by Jeremy Wagstaff explained why SharedCopy did the correct thing and is in the right place and time (whereas ThirdVoice is ahead of their time).

Here are some excerpts about the article:

Back in 1999, when the World Wide Web was still just a collection of Web pages loosely joined by pre-Google search engines, a Singaporean named Eng-Siong Tan had an idea: a software equivalent of sticky notes that let online readers leave their own comments on a Web site, whether the owners allowed them or not.

This idea was good enough to get Mr. Tan and his tool, Third Voice, venture capital backing, an office in Silicon Valley and recognition by Fortune magazine as a “Cool Company.” It seemed to usher in a new era of consumer power, as an article in Public Relations Quarterly put it: “Suddenly, the once private communications of disaffected consumers will be broadcast in public to many other consumers. The once asymmetrical dialogue between company and consumers is set to change — in the consumers’ favor.”

Despite this, or perhaps because of this attention, ThirdVoice crashed and burned. Failing to attract sufficient users to earn advertising revenue, ThirdVoice changed tack in 2000 to become a sort of keyword search engine. But it wasn’t enough and by April 2001 the company was just another victim of the dot.com bubble. The site closed, and Mr. Tan sank into obscurity (he couldn’t be located immediately for comment).

Now, eight years on, another Singaporean is back doing much the same thing. James Seng has set up a service called SharedCopy, which allows users to take a snapshot of a Web page and add and share comments and even doodles on it. These pages can be public, or just shared with a few friends. Mr. Seng isn’t alone: I counted at least a half-dozen similar services, including zpeech, Trailfire, Stickis, i-Lighter and Protonotes. All offer some variation on the idea that a Web page can be commented on and those comments can be read by others.

So what’s changed between then and now?

Well, in some ways ThirdVoice was ahead of its time. Back then, the Internet was more about us reading what other people had written, and not talking back. Very few people had heard of blogs back then — and blogs, whatever you think of them, were the vanguard that ushered in this revolution we’re now all seeing, where the line between readers and writers has blurred.

But at the time, Mr. Tan and ThirdVoice found themselves castigated. Web sites were set up to oppose ThirdVoice on the grounds that it allowed anonymous Internet graffiti: One Web site, “No to ThirdVoice,” (www.avantart.com/personal/nototv/saynototv .html) complained that “the tool to add notes to someone else’s pages is…a tool for coward and ugly results.” ……

We congratulate James Seng and Choon Keat on their feat with SharedCopy.com.

Related Links:
[1] TechCrunch, Bookmark, Copy, Note and Share: SharedCopy.com
[2] Killer Start-Ups, SharedCopy.com - Annotate Sites and Share
[3] James Seng, SharedCopy
[4] Web.SG, Interviews with Singapore’s Next Gen Hackers: Choonkeat
[5] LifeHacker, Share any web page with SharedCopy
[6] StartupSquad, SharedCopy - more web annotation for everyone
[7] Folksonomy, Interview with SharedCopy

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