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What is Trailfire?

About a month ago I was looking for a way to annotate the web and came across Trailfire. In their own words.

Find what’s important on the web in an entirely new way. Learn what others have already discovered. Follow trails of web pages and discover new ideas, cool lists, hot topics, reviews… and more.

I see it as the next revolution to del.icio.us, or at least a nice spin on it. What you do is create (or follow) ‘trails’ of webpages for others to follow and comment on those webpages. These ‘trails’ are mostly centered around a certain theme, but can be a trail of any type.

There is an arrow next to your comment that will allow the user to go to the next webpage/comment.

Social Aspects:

Just like all social webpages that are cropping up there are ratings you can give to a person’s trail. There is a also popular page with some of the highest rated pages of all time, as well as a recent page with some of the recently updated trails.

As a user goes through the trail there is a place for comments on each page to add to the trail creator’s comments.

Educational Possibilities:

When I first saw this I instantly thought of a teacher guiding their class through the internet, exposing them to different articles, pictures and what regarding a certain subject. The awesome thing about this tour is the absence of the professor. They could create it in advance and send the students to check it out on their own time. Students would then have the time to explore the pages, comment, and even add to the trail.

Students are often given assignments to look on the web for information. Students could create their own trails as part of that project, where they could comment and educate. Not only would it benefit them, but their trail would join the fabric of the social web for others to learn from.

I believe that the internet will continue to grow as far as the information that it contains. Imagine 5-10 years into the future where research papers no longer stand alone with hyper-linked footnotes, but actually go from one reference to another, allowing the reader to understand the entire background for a reference. The web dynamically becomes the platform for composition.

My First Trail - Google and Education:

I obviously like the idea a lot so I thought I would give it a test run. Sign up and everything else was typical. I installed the extension in firefox (note: toolbar also available for internet explorer) and went to town. Commenting was an easy button that you could move anywhere on the page. There was a WYSIWYG editor that allowed standard formatting including hyperlinking and pictures. You could edit comments easy and even move your trail pages around (on the mainpage).

I figured I should create a trail around something I know and understand. What am I more passionate about than Google and Education. You can view my trail here.

Note: If my comment doesn’t automatically show up in your browser look for a little icon. I tried to put them next to the titles of the pages. Click on that so see my comments and follow the trail.

Complaints/Suggestions:

Overall the process was very easy. I am using a very high speed connection, so it might be a little slower to load for some people. I did try out my trail on another computer that didn’t have the extension/toolbar installed and it was kind of slow to load. The users could, however, still see the comments. That was nice!

I did have a couple of ideas for improvements:

• Publish/Unpublish option - as soon as I put my first page on my trail it showed up in the recently updated page. There is an option to make the trial private, but it would also be good to have a publish/unpublish button if you are working on the trail.
• Voice Capability - wouldn’t it be awesome if instead of writing your comments you just spoke them and they played when a person followed your trail?
• Highlight capability - as far as I know there is no way to highlight something on the page in addition to the comment. It would be very useful to highlight something you were commenting about on a page… especially if there were several things that needed to be commented on.
• Education Trail under Categories - Right now you can categorize your trails, but there is no educational category… don’t forget about us!

Overall I think this is a great tool with some great potential. It does not look like there are a ton of users right now, but I imagine that will continue to grow.

What other potential uses could you see for Trailfire?