14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week we wrote about Marginize, a startup bent on succeeding where others have failed, making an universal annotations system for the web that people actually use. We got in touch with founder and CEO Ziad Sultan to see why he thinks Marginize will fare better than others before it.
Softpedia: To start things off, for those that may not know yet, what does Marginize do and why should people use it?
Ziad Sultan: Marginize provides a browser add-on that augments every page on the Web with a sidebar, enabling users to engage with each other through comments and check-ins independently from the owner of the Web page. The goal is to give users greater freedom of expression where it matters: on the sites themselves.
Softpedia: Most agree that a universal annotations and comments system can and would be useful, but no one has managed to make it work in practice. Google more or less failed and so have plenty others before it, why would Marginize succeed?
Ziad Sultan: Previous attempt failed to reach critical mass because you need users in order to generate content, and you need content in order to get users. Now, for the first time in the history of the web, there are already conversations taking place publicly about most websites (on Twitter mostly). So it occurred to me that the critical mass problem can be overcome by pre-populating the sidebar, and I decided to start the company.
Softpedia: The social component is an advantage, both in terms of content but also because people are more comfortable with the services they already use. But will it be enough, are there plans to expand the service? The ‘check in’ component is one example, but are there others, like a community-based rating system for the websites?
Ziad Sultan: The sidebar is more than a commenting system. It is a parallel (augmented) web, a free space for the user. In that space, users can already communicate with each other and share ideas, or check in to tell the world that they were there. But there are many more opportunities to make this space valuable which we are working on and will be releasing over the next weeks/months/years.
Softpedia: Maybe it’s too early to tell, but how many people have started using Marginize? Are people signing up after getting links shared with Marginize from their friends, or are they coming from other places, news coverage for example? More importantly, are the new users sticking around?
Ziad Sultan: This is our first real public announcement, so you should check in (no pun intended!) with me again in the future. It does look like people following mar.gy links from their friends are enjoying seeing the full conversation on the side. Some of them interact with the sidebar and end up adding the browser add-on themselves. So that's encouraging!
Softpedia: Right now, Marginize uses a page’s URL to uncover tweets. Are there plans to expand this and maybe surface tweets that may be relevant to the page based on keywords, topics and so on? How about customizing the service for different websites, one version for YouTube another for Wikipedia?
Ziad Sultan: Maybe. But the philosophy so far has been to avoid any "black box" effects where we come up with a mapping that is unclear to the users (and possibly inaccurate). So right now we focus on extending a given page identified by its URL, and that's consistent with our mission of a parallel augmented web.
Softpedia: There’s an add-on for Mozilla Firefox and one for Google Chrome, are versions for Internet Explorer and Safari coming any time soon?
Ziad Sultan: Yes soon. Safari sooner than IE. But users of any browsers for which we don't have an add-on can add our bookmarklet to their bookmarks bar and use it on any site. The only difference is that it doesn't follow you from site to site as you browse, but other than that it has the full functionality of Marginize.
Softpedia: Assuming that you overcome all of the obstacles and Marginize becomes widely used, how will you turn a popular web service into a business? Are there plans to generate revenue in the near term, or are you taking more of a ‘Twitter’ approach, wait until more people use and then figure out the financial side?
Ziad Sultan: Again, it's probably worth having this conversation later. We have ideas about how to turn it into a business but products evolve so much in the early stages of a startup that we would probably need to revisit this anyway. If we are successful in our vision of augmenting the web with a space belonging to the users, we will have created a lot of value and I am confident that means we can generate revenue.