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Genius Beta — Annotate the Internet
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@rrhoover Thanks! This definitely wasn't the plan from the beginning. But we were always obsessed with the notion of web annotation, primarily in the form of our love affair with Google Reader.
I know Google Reader nostalgia has reached a Tickle me Elmo level of meme, but still.. it was a great product! And what made it so great was you could say what you wanted to say about the EXACT PART OF THING that was funny or weird or whatever.
We were so obsessed we built a Google Reader clone called reader2000.com (which you can use and it's pretty cool!)
Anyway, how cool would Google Reader be if, in addition to a feed, it followed you around the Internet and you could always see what your friends / famous people were saying about stuff?
@dumbnamenumbers @mmmmmnmmmnmmn @rrhoover Can you imagine what PH will looks like once Genius comments will start to pop all over the place :)
@dumbnamenumbers I guess in order for Genius go mainstream it needs to be bundled together with the browser or you'll need to release your own Genius browser or every website should have a turn-on annotation button. What is the long-term plan to increase adoption?
@nikitakorotaev
The key to adoption IMO is making the basic annotation reading experience work without any special browser or browser add-on – I should be able to annotate and share those annotations with you even if you've never heard of Genius.
This is why the "genius.it/" prepend trick is so important – it allows anyone to read and create annotations on any web page just by adding "genius.it/" to the start of the URL (no plugin required!)
(If you think about it, genius.it is kinda like a "cloud web browser" that allows you to bring the Genius browser extension with you everywhere)
@nikitakorotaev @dumbnamenumbers I can see how that would make it universally accesable, but having to append "genius.it/" to a url to annotate it is a clunky/awkward user experience for many. You should look into integrating a Genius "social sharing button" type thing to go alongside FB and Twitter buttons, but to annotate.
Me 9 days ago here on Product Hunt: "Imagine a decentralised Genius.com where you can annotate and share any piece of content you come across." 😂 – http://www.producthunt.com/posts...
When google added lyrics to the top page results of search how did ya'll react? I imagine lyrics seo was a big part of your customer acquisition strategy even though your product is vastly different in experience to reading plain lyrics on googles page. How are you going about promoting your different verticals now? Are lyrics something that just took a hit but similar strategies are working elsewhere?
@anderson760 We take a long view of this stuff. We're trying to build a indispensable resource about songs (we like to think of it as a "museum of songs"), which means having accurate and well-formatted lyrics but also annotations from fans and artists, information on the song/production as a whole, etc. We believe that in 100 years when you're listening to a song, you'll be experiencing some information that grew out of the Genius product and community
The Google thing is funny. If you search, for example, for "eminem my name is lyrics," you get the Google onebox result before the Genius result. But if you click into the Genius result, you get the whole backstory on the song from Eminem himself, as well as a bunch of great annotations from the community. We would obviously like to be the default first result for every query for which our pages are the best result. But we're not sweating it too much: the arc of SERP ranking is long and it bends toward justice!
Needs more upvotes, this is great I was looking for something like this the other day...The universe has some weird ways of working its magic on us!
I've been waiting for the chrome extension for a while, glad you finally launched one!
It'll be interesting to see how content on Wikipedia gets annotated. How will Genius stay on top of quality control for such content?
EDIT: Someone is already exploiting this: dropbox.com/s/h3wxiaxyf8qzx7d/Screenshot%202015-04-08%2013.31.01.png
How will you prevent this from happening in the future?
Also, links aren't clickable (ie: Hackernews) if they're highlighted.
Overall, great job!
Tom and Ilan will be here at 9am PST to do an AMA - let's ask great qs for them! I have a couple below
Also - just released a podcast with them: https://m.soundcloud.com/product...
Q's:
1) How have you thought about building this new product while at the same time growing from Rap Genius into Sports Genius, Fashion Genius, and other verticals? Is it two separate products?
2) What are your biggest KPI's when evaluating the success of the beta?
@eriktorenberg Listened to your podcast with them on the subway on the way to work this morning. Strong interview, you asked hard questions, and I liked their stories. I've enjoyed following the maturation of the founders here alongside the maturation of the company.
I like that they seem to have mostly remained themselves and not become some muted, tamed, "PR-fake-face" version of themselves.
Excited to play with some of the new annotation features.
@eriktorenberg
1) Genius.com will always exist as a store for documents and media that have no other natural home on the Internet (the biggest example of course being song lyrics).
But for texts that DO have a natural home elsewhere on the Internet, we don't want to force people to come to our website to read the annotations – instead we want to bring Genius annotations to wherever people are experiencing media and culture, and this new beta is one of our first baby steps in that direction.
2) I'm a big fan of the Aaron Sorkin / West Wing school of software development – if you can get 17 people obsessed with the product it's gotta be pretty good!
AMA: What would be your advice on company name changes - when and when not to do it and what should people think about? (E.g. Should Product Hunt become Hunt? :P)
@eriktorenberg
We've changed our name twice - from Rap Exegesis to Rap Genius, and then from Rap Genius to Genius. I'm down to say the first change was obviously good, because no one knows what exegesis is or how to say it or spell it.
We're making progress on the long-term consciousness shift of the second change. Give a talk at a college and you'll hear a tonnnn of "I LOVE RAP GENIUS!"
Overall, as with anything, it's way more work than you think. You guys should become Punt!
1) Who are some of the main partners you are working with first? What's the launch roll out strategy?
2) The hire of @sfj made a lot of (positive) noise. How does editorial fit into your strategy?
This is probably not worth caring about right now, but I thought I'd give the very specific feedback that when wearing blue-blocker glasses for melatonin purposes, the yellow highlights on white background are totally invisible.
The glasses basically zero out the blue channel of RGB, making #FFFF00 and #FFFFFF look identical.
1. What's the best way to ensure quality annotation?
2. How can you build an early community of power annotators similar to the Wikipedia and Quora communities?
I think this is an awesome execution of an idea that has long been needed. While there are many ways this can and will evolve, I look forward to seeing the community adding value to complex or nuanced writings with equally thoughtful annotation and insight. Congratulations!
How do you ensure the annotations are always valuable to users? I'm not sure I really want to know how everyone interprets an article, for instance.
This is....genius
I do think Point is onto something similar but it's after more of a closed network whereas I see this as being WAY more open (and better)
This makes Genius a lot more convenient! Super excited to use this in my day-to-day browsing.
First impression: the annotation box is a little visually overwhelming. Lot's of gray buttons all over the place.
@thomasmeagher I feel you on this! Lots of grey boxes. We're working on designing an "annotation unit" that looks and feels natural and works consistently across different contexts - on our website, on other websites, in a feed of annotations of people you follow, on mobile, etc. Stay tuned
@mrandydavis
Word! Though ours is FAR from the first shot at this – there's a whole Wikipedia page chronicling previous attempts.
But I agree it's "about time this became part of the fabric of the Internet" (*fingers crossed emoji* (why doesn't that exist?))
My co-founder Ilan and I are psyched to share an early look at the future of Genius / the Internet with y’all!
As you probably know, Genius started as a project to annotate hip-hop lyrics. We’ve since expanded beyond music into annotating all kinds of text — literature, political speeches, the Bible, etc.
Now we’re embarking on our biggest challenge yet: annotating the entire Internet and in doing so fulfilling one of the fever dreams of the early web. Not many people know this, but when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina were building the first version of Mosaic, they included a feature that allowed users to annotate web pages, but ended up scrapping it for technical reasons.
Here’s how to use the Genius Beta:
To annotate any web page, just add the prefix “genius.it/” to its URL. For example, check out the annotated version of this very page: genius.it/producthunt.com/posts/genius-beta.
For an even smoother experience, you can annotate with our Chrome extension, bookmarklet, or iOS app.
So check it out and remember: this is beta software! We need your ideas and feedback to make it truly great. Post your thoughts and questions in this thread and let’s work together to make the annotated Internet a reality!
Much love,
Tom & Ilan, Genius Co-founders
@dumbnamenumbers Hi Tom & Ilan, why did you opt for the sticky button on the right side of the webpage rather than stick to the button next to the address bar? Seeing that button light up to know it's been annotated would be useful and less intrusive (don't necessarily want to see that every page has been annotated and stuck with the side button).
@dumbnamenumbers congratulations for the launch! What's the difference between Genius and Diig? Thanks!
@dumbnamenumbers It's cool, we have added it to our pitch academy - if the pop up would be a bit more friendly though ( e.g. not just 'this is for beta testers' ) and maybe even include an option for anonymous annotations we could even use it as our support tool!
Like I'd want to have it on our front page, so customers can ask direct questions on specific parts - or we could annotate features in more detail.
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