A.nnotate

» see a.nnotate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In January 2006 the Scottish Government announced SMART Scotland funding for a small Scottish company called Textensor Limited, for proof-of-concept work on authoring structured content from ordinary text. The software that came out of it was called Notate and got written up in a white paper in 2007, with support for semantic web authoring bolted on. In 2008 the company turned the useful half into a public service and named it A.nnotate.

What it did was simple to describe and hard to build in 2008. You uploaded a document or handed it a URL, and A.nnotate gave you back the same pages in a browser with a layer you could write on. PDF worked, so did Microsoft Office files, OpenDocument and plain images. Your notes lived next to the text rather than in a separate email thread, and the document stayed private unless you invited somebody by address.

The browser list in its own technical summary tells you the era: Firefox, Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8, Safari and Chrome, with JavaScript and cookies required. There was an API, plus modules for Documentum and Moodle, which says who was actually paying. University departments and document teams, not consumers.

My own marking up in those years happened in a desktop reader on a machine I controlled, which is where an engineer's instinct puts other people's drafts. A.nnotate asked you to send the file to a server in Scotland and trust the copy that came back. For a lab or a small team that was a fine trade. For me it was never the trade I needed, and I came to the category years later through tools that had learned from this one without crediting it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ pages as pictures ~

The implementation was the clever bit. Rather than fight browsers over fonts and layout, A.nnotate rendered each page server-side into an image and laid the annotation layer over the top, so a document looked identical to everyone looking at it. On that layer you could mark a region, draw an arrow, highlight a run of text or start a comment thread, and choose whether the notes showed in the margin, in floating boxes, as footnotes or inline.

There was also a bookmarklet that snapshotted a live web page and let you annotate the snapshot, which meant your notes survived the page changing underneath you. Crocodoc built a business on the same server-side rendering idea and got bought by Box in 2013. Textensor kept running theirs for another decade on subscriptions.

~ the name ~

The name is a domain hack. The company owned nnotate.com and put the service on the host called a, so the product name reads across the dot: a.nnotate.com. It was a 2008 trick, the same instinct that gave us del.icio.us, and it aged about as well. By the 2020s the company had quietly collected annotate.com, which is where its surviving product lives today under the name Annotate.

~ the closure faq ~

The shutdown was done properly, with emails and banners on the site before the date. The FAQ left behind says the service was retired with effect from 29 November 2023, that from 30 November accounts were closed and access ended, and that everything stored would be deleted within three months. On why, the company wrote that although they had a small following of enthusiastic users, the service was no longer generating enough revenue to support the costs of maintaining it, and that they were focusing on other products in the portfolio.

One line in that FAQ is the whole problem with trusting a server with your margins: asked whether they could download your documents and annotations for you, the answer was no, the download process was simple enough for users to do themselves, and the service has now closed so download is no longer possible. a.nnotate.com stopped answering at all some time after January 2024.

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