Third Voice

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

~ the obit ~

i missed third voice at the time. by 1999 i was on an IE 5 install over a 33.6k ttnet modem in ankara, and a browser plug-in that phoned home for annotations on every page load was not a bandwidth budget i had. it was also an anglophone web product with an english-speaking user base doing english-language commentary on english-language pages. that whole layer sat past the edge of what i actually loaded.

of my life, either way. third voice was founded in menlo park and launched its internet explorer plug-in in may 1999. the pitch was straightforward. any user could highlight any span of text on any web page and attach a note to it. the note went to third voice's servers rather than to the site itself. anyone else who had the plug-in installed would see a red triangle icon on the page and could open a sidebar to read the comments. "your web. your voice." was the tagline (close enough).

i was not around for the initial press cycle, but the tech press liked it in the first few months. the promise was a universal comment layer for the entire web, at a moment when comment sections were still rare and where most sites offered no reader-facing discussion at all. jokes started showing up on the white house page. news articles collected marginalia. that was the early honeymoon (roughly).

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the backlash ~

by summer '99 a lot of website owners had noticed the red triangles on their own pages and did not like what they saw. the argument was that visitors reading third voice notes on a site were seeing content the site owner had no ability to moderate or remove. sometimes it was jokes. sometimes it was libel. sometimes it was spam pointing at porn.

a campaign called "say no to third voice" (SNTTV) organized against the plug-in in the late '99 and 2000 window. a coalition of small-web publishers and personal-site owners argued that the notes were graffiti and that hosting them off-site was a legal fiction that did not change what visitors saw. for whatever reason, third voice's engineering side made it worse. the plug-in was found to have cross-site scripting holes that let malicious notes inject javascript into the pages they annotated. spam accounts flooded high-traffic pages with off-topic notes. the moderation stack could not keep up.

~ the actual end ~

by early 2001 the product had lost its enterprise pitch. the free consumer plug-in was still available but the company had pivoted twice toward business collaboration tools while the moderation cost of the open plug-in kept climbing. anyway, in april 2001 third voice discontinued the plug-in and wound down the annotation service. the servers that held every note anyone had ever written went dark shortly after.

the death was not one thing exactly. it was a stack. the SNTTV campaign gave publishers a public rallying point. the XSS holes gave technical journalists a reason to stop recommending the plug-in. the spam and libel notes gave the average user a reason to uninstall. the dot-com money that would have paid for a bigger moderation team dried up in the same quarter it would have been needed. either way, april '01 was the end of it.

~ the long tail ~

in fairness, the third voice idea keeps trying to come back every few years. diigo shipped a similar annotation layer in the mid-2000s. genius ran the web-annotator play in 2016 and hit the same wall of publisher pushback. hypothes.is has run since 2011 as an academic-focused version that mostly avoided the fight by scoping to research articles. medium built its inline highlight-and-note system inside its own site to sidestep the whole "who owns the annotation" question.

roughly. the third voice failure encoded something the web has never really resolved. a browser is a client that the user controls. it can render whatever it wants on top of whatever page it loads. a plug-in that adds a comment layer is technically no different from an ad blocker or a dark-mode extension. publishers accept the latter and reject the former, and the difference is not code. it is a social norm about whose page is on the screen.

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