Stickis and BlogRovR: the conversation is everywhere

Half day after our launch and I want to get down some of the impressions from what we’ve seen.

First, some very nicely done press by Nick Gonzalez at Techcrunch, and also by Rafe Needleman at Webware. Interestingly, they focus on slightly different ways of looking at what we do, but they’re both quite positive. Kudos to both of them for getting pretty deeply into Stickis and understanding it well.

Nick calls us a “Syndicated Blog Annotator”, and his article focuses on the way we allow users to annotate the web using a WYSIWYG editor, in-place on the websites they’re annotating, and how we bring in web services and content from informational channels to which you subscribe.

Rafe says we’ll help you “Take your favorite blogs for a walk” and particularly likes the ability to see what ones preferred bloggers have to say about whatever is being browsed.

Observing both the reactions from our new users (not surprisingly, today’s been our largest user acquisition day ever), and the comments people have left in various places, it seems to me the one thing that we ought to be messaging clearer is the individually personalized nature of Stickis as a communications medium. The central idea here is that:

• You care about what your community has to say about the web.
• Your community is different from mine.
• Stickis lets your read and write to your community.

What you publish in Stickis get seen only by those who subscribe to what your channel of notes. Its like a blog, though it is read in-place anywhere on the web it relates. You can invite people to subscribe to your notes, they can find you through a reply you leave for someone, or by seeing a URL to a note or channel which you can embed in a blog entry or email anywhere.

This is what makes us most different from the other “annotation” tools, including Google Weblog Comments, and Third Voice, which some commentators have mentioned.

With Stickis, you’re not seeing what everyone writes, but only what your chosen sources write. And you’re writing only for those who care about what you have to say.

The power to decide what to consume is in your hands, and it is as easy to block a note or unsubscribe to a source who no longer provides compelling value as it is to add one.

As Stickis users invite more of their friends to connect up, we’re looking to see groups of people converge around shared channels of notes, to annotate the web for one another, monitoring what one another is interested in using Alerts. Facilitating that is one of our main goals with Stickis.

* Another picture from Steve Jurvetson

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