SharedCopy

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

~ the obituary ~

SharedCopy went live in March 2007 and did one thing. You gave it a URL, it took a copy of the page, and then you drew on the copy: a highlighter, a pen, sticky notes, an arrow at the thing you were complaining about. Then you sent somebody the link to your version. All of it ran in the browser over AJAX at a point when doing that reliably across the web's actual HTML was genuinely hard.

The cache is the part that mattered and the part everyone underrated. If you highlight a live page and send the link, the page can change and your highlight lands on whatever moved into that position. SharedCopy stored the copy it had marked, so the annotation stayed attached to the words it was about. That is the difference between a note and a note that still means something in six months.

TechCrunch and Lifehacker covered it in the first year, and so did the Wall Street Journal, some of them warmly and some noting that it broke on complicated pages, which it did until the July 2007 release fixed the highlighter and added tags. BusinessWeek nominated Choon Keat for its Asia Young Entrepreneur award that year. It was a one-person Singapore product competing for attention with venture-funded American startups doing roughly the same thing, and it got more of that attention than the funding gap should have allowed.

~ the case file ~

~ the callback ~

The feature that dated best is the one the marketing barely mentioned. SharedCopy would push your annotated page back out to wherever your work actually lived. The icon strip on the homepage is the honest documentation of who was using it: Delicious, Basecamp, Backpack, Trac, Bugzilla, Tumblr, Twitter, plain email. You marked up a broken layout and it went into the ticket. You highlighted a paragraph and it went into the bookmark.

That is a small idea with a long shadow. Every modern review tool, from design handoff apps to the comment threads in a shared document, is doing the same job of pinning a remark to a specific piece of content and routing it somewhere a team already looks. In 2007 it had to be bolted onto other people's web pages from the outside by one person in Singapore.

~ the layer that never landed ~

Annotation was supposed to be part of the web and never became it. Third Voice tried in 1999 and got run off by webmasters who did not want strangers writing in the margins of their sites. Google Sidewiki tried in 2009 with the whole of Google behind it and was gone by 2011. Every one of these needed the same thing to work, which was a large number of people agreeing to annotate in the same place, and that agreement never formed anywhere except inside single companies.

So the ending is quiet in the way a one-person product's ending usually is. The archive has the full site working on 7 August 2012. By 16 December 2013 sharedcopy.com returns a page of a few hundred bytes with nothing in it and the favicon 404s. From July 2014 the address is a 302, and it has been a 302 ever since: first to choonkeat.com, today to the author's blog. No announcement, no farewell post, no date. A tool for leaving notes on other people's pages did not leave one on its own.

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