Seeing TribalVoice or the modern equivilant (browser plut-in that lets people write stuff 'all over' websites)

January 22, 2005 4:02 AM

There used to be a web browser plug-in that let people write stuff all over websites. I think it was called Tribal Voice. Is there anything like that now?
posted by krisjohn to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

It was called Third Voice.

I don't know the answer to your question, I'm sorry.
posted by madman at 5:19 AM on January 22, 2005

It was called Third Voice (see link above) and was a plugin, I'm not sure if there's an equivalent. The closest thing I can think of is StumbleUpon.
posted by jeremias at 5:22 AM on January 22, 2005

Man, that was one of my saddest online days, when I logged on and Third Voice was gone. But re:your question, I think that for the same reasons Third Voice shut down in the first place, there is not likely to be anything similar out there now. Which sucks.
posted by Who_Am_I at 6:20 AM on January 22, 2005

I think you might be conflating two things. There was something called Tribal Voice, which was a site run by Native Americans. They had developed some software called PowWow, which was a sort of chat/web browser network app. It allowed 6 people to slave their web browsers to the "chief's" browser, and then talk about the sites they were looking at. Not a bad idea.

It's long gone, but you can read a description of it here, apparently reviewed in November 1995.

I chiefly recall it because, while searching their terribly-designed site to see if they would ever release a Mac version of the software, I stumbled upon a picture gallery of the founders in the company of a large number of nude teenage girls.

I'm not aware of any software that does this now, sorry.
posted by ikkyu2 at 6:39 AM on January 22, 2005

Wikalong is a FireFox plugin that provides a wiki for whatever you're looking at on the Web, sort of shared margin notes. It's a bit quiet because it hasn't been adopted that widely, but it's still neat.
posted by mendel at 8:20 AM on January 22, 2005

Graphitii the web is a web app that seems to do something similar, but mashes the pages a bit.

Metafilter
posted by page404 at 8:25 AM on January 22, 2005

In 1999, he and two colleagues launched Third Voice, a free browser plug-in that allowed Web surfers to annotate any site with their comments. The idea was to spark "inline discussions" among Web users, promoting a new civic mindedness that would keep corporations, government and the media honest.

Reminds me of how they thought TV would educate the masses and usher in a new golden era.

The annotation functionality was cool. I wish it were still around. But people and their funny ideas about how something new will be used to raise up mankind....
posted by scarabic at 10:32 AM on January 22, 2005

These three threads may be helpful. Most of the suggestions are duplicates of answers given here but I'm sure there are a couple others.
posted by stuart_s at 10:32 AM on January 22, 2005

If you're in an experimental mood, you may want to read about W3C's Annotea project. There is also Annozilla, a beta project for Mozilla, it allows read-only support for Firefox.
posted by yonderboy at 2:18 PM on January 23, 2005