Launch!

As of today, we’re making our general purpose annotator available from our homepage. If you use the Chrome browser, you can download and install it as an extension. An equivalent extension for Firefox is coming shortly. The annotator allows you to bring note-taking and conversation capabilities to any page on the web.

The application has a variety of features. These include:

Annotation
Easily annotate and highlight web pages and online PDFs. Annotations will be saved and re-attached whenever you return to the document.

Discussion
Hold conversations directly on the web by replying to others.

Tagging
Tags allow you to structure and organize your annotations across multiple documents. Click on a tag or use “tag:<term>” in the search bar to find all annotations with a specific tag.

Sharing
Every annotation has its own URL so you can easily share them with others.

Privacy Controls
Annotations can be marked as public or “Only Me” giving you control over who can see what you say.

Stream
The stream is a great way to see what people are reading and annotating all over the web.

We have a lot more in mind. Our roadmap will give you an idea of what lies in our future.

The long view

Our mission is to bring a conversation layer to the world’s knowledge, but we won’t be doing that alone. We participate in a vibrant community of scholars, scientists, technologists and others that share our vision.

We think an annotated future is best achieved through open standards, like the Web Annotation Working Group recently chartered at the W3C.

Those standards should inform an open source software ecosystem that others can use to build and host their own applications. The Hypothes.is application is built on Annotator, which is an annotation framework in use by a community of other like-minded projects. Much of our energy is devoted to making sure that Annotator incorporates the advances we’ve developed, and best reflects our thinking about how to bring Annotation to the widest audience possible.

Talk to us

Launching isn’t an end, but a beginning. In order to chart the best course for the future, we need to hear from you.

Send us a tweet and let us know how we’re doing, what you’d like to see next, or any issues you might experience.

If you feel your question/comment might be useful for other people, please consider posting on our forum.

Subscribe to our dev mailing list by sending any message to dev+subscribe@list.hypothes.is (archive).

Please join us in #hypothes.is on freenode where contributors and community members hang out, discuss the project, and answer questions.

Help support us

The Hypothes.is Project is a non-profit, US 501.c3 organization supported by foundation grants and individuals like you. Consider making a donation to support our efforts!