Friday, July 25, 2008

Startups aim to help you share the web

By Christopher Calnan

While there are plenty of tools that allow a user to share web content to a broad audience — think Digg or Reddit — the latest crop of web-based tools designed to organize and share Internet content are focused on sharing content with just one person or a small group.

Medford-based Snipd Inc. and Cambridge-based WebNotes Inc. are the latest entries in the content-sharing space. Both firms were built by current or recent college students crafting online tools with widgets that let users sort and share content with just a couple of mouse clicks.

WebNotes includes electronic sticky notes, highlighters and an annotation tool for organizing and sharing text from web pages. For annotated content, the website generates a unique URL creating a new page containing just the highlighted text to share with others.

WebNotes also enables users to e-mail the link to that selected content by clicking on an envelope icon. The tool is similar to the send-this-story feature found on most media websites, but WebNotes also aggregates the shared content on an electronic clipboard that the user can access again later.

WebNotes founder Ryan Damico said the goal is to simplify content sharing.

“We don’t think the tools have evolved to keep up the management of the content that’s online,” he said. “We want to be the productivity application for people who are doing things online.”

WebNotes was founded in 2007, three years after five MIT students came up with the idea when they were frustrated with organizing research notes, Damico said. After trying to develop the product as a side project, Damico quit his program manager’s job at Tewksbury-based Avid Technologies Inc. and gathered an undisclosed amount of capital from family and friends.

The tool is now in a private (invitation only) beta test and Damico expects to open the test to the general public by the end of the summer. He plans to eventually generate revenue by developing a premium version of the application for commercial users.

In June, University of Texas students Alex Schliker and Vic Ramon relocated to Medford to develop Snipd, which last week launched a closed alpha test and is scheduled to shift to an open beta test this week or next.

The application captures both text and the text page’s URL, and the embedded code of video or audio that is then e-mailed via a widget through Snipd so the user doesn’t have to leave the web page being shared. Unlike Webnotes, content that is shared can also be viewed by other Snipd community members who track what is popular, similar to Digg.com.

Schliker, who plans to bring in a round of angel investment by the end of the summer, expects to market Snipd to media companies that want to identify “hot zones,” or content that visitors are viewing. That data would then enable Snipd customers to target advertisers.

New England companies that have developed such content-sharing tools include Osterville-based research-citation website operator SourceAid LLC; Lexington-based Temair Inc., which operates social networking research website Carmun.com; and online news aggregator Reddit.com, which started in Somerville in 2005 before it was acquired by Condé Nast in 2006.