Webware

Fleck is a free Web annotation tool for marking up blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles with little sticky notes. The service launched late last year as a Firefox-only tool and has since added compatibility with Internet Explorer. Fleck, like other annotation tools, can be a dead-simple way to collaborate and leave visual feedback for others without the hassle of software or the complexity of more advanced business collaboration tools.

Managing annotations with Fleck is very simple. Just plug a URL from any Web site into Fleck.com and you're ready to go. You can create and move around small yellow bullets that double as full-sized sticky notes when you expand them. Everything is managed from a floating toolbar that resides on the bottom of your browser window. The toolbar gives you straightforward access to add and share annotations with others. You can send off your notes to someone via e-mail or publish them straight to your blog if you're a WordPress user and are willing to install the plug-in on the server that's running your blogging tool.

Annotations show up in two ways: either as a bullet or a full sticky note.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What's more interesting is the Firefox extension Fleck launched last month. Once installed, it shows any publicly available Fleck markups for the page you're currently visiting. It's reminiscent of the Smart Digg Button extension we wrote about last week, although a little less creepy. By default, all Flecks are turned on as public, although users can set them to be private by checking a small box.

Fleck is really simple to use, but doesn't offer some of the really rich sharing and markup options we've seen lately with Yoono [hands-on] and Grouptivity [hands-on]. I'd like to see Fleck add a drawing tool, and a way to make lines and boxes, too. There's also no way to make changes with others in real time. The closest thing to that is the versioning feature, which gives each user multiple workspaces.

It's still nice to use one of these tools without the need for registration or any sort of installation. The downloadable extensions that Fleck offers only makes it easier, and a little richer for exploration.

To see an example of a Webware post with Fleck annotations, click here. To mark up this post, click the 'annotate this page' link I've embedded below.

Grouptivity launched an updated version of its content-sharing tool on Monday. Blog posters can now add a "discuss this" button on the bottom of any post, which will pull up the Grouptivity sharing dialogue to send off the post or article to others. This dialogue allows you to pick from various pieces of media (photos and videos) that you want to share, along with a full text copy of the content. There's also the option to send it off to multiple e-mail addresses, set up read confirmations, and author explanatory messages to your recipients.

If you've ever used Facebook's "share this" feature, you have some idea for what Grouptivity is useful for, although unlike Facebook, Grouptivity allows its users to share interesting Web content via e-mail, IM and even Skype. Besides this embeddable "Discuss this" button, there's also a browser bookmarklet that will let you share with friends anything you're looking at, which is a little bit like del.icio.us.

The company is claiming this service has made the "e-mail this" option "obsolete," which I'd normally say is unfounded, except in this case, the service really does provide a much richer sharing tool than what you get with the common e-mail link. Often times when a friend or colleague sends me an article, it's just a URL, or worse--an attachment.

I've embedded a "discuss this" link below. You can also read our previous hands-on review of Grouptivity.