BlogRovR

Activeweave, Inc.

Activeweave's BlogRovR running on Firefox
Developer(s)	Activeweave, Inc.
Initial release	November 2006
Written in	Java JavaScript XUL
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Type	Firefox Extension, IE Plugin
License	Freeware, Proprietary

Activeweave, Inc. was a Silicon Valley-based startup, operating in the attention management and social web arenas. It was acquired in April 2008 by Buzzlogic, Inc.

Activeweave's original positioning, through the Stickis service, revolved around and extended the notion of social annotation for web sites. Web annotations were pioneered in 1999 by the company Third Voice, with a service allowing its users to:

Lacking the filtering mechanism which would allow users to select whose annotations they would see, Third Voice came to be perceived as intrusive, spam-like graffiti, and consequently was fought by site owners, and largely ignored by users overwhelmed by the amount of public commentary on popular sites. For this, it ceased operation in 2001.

One of Activeweave's significant departures from Third Voice's approach was to base the sharing and visibility of annotations on an underlying social network. Activeweave also innovated in terms of user experience by ensuring annotations were displayed in an unobtrusive manner, not interfering with the visited sites:

Subsequently, Activeweave released BlogRovR, that built on the same technology but made the system read-only, with annotations being supplied implicitly by blog posts relevant to the web page being viewed by users.

Activeweave was co-founded in late 2005 by software entrepreneurs Jean Sini and Marc A. Meyer. In early 2006, the company raised a round of seed investment funding from business angels, including Esther Dyson and Eric Di Benedetto.

Activeweave develops a contextual and social web overlay technology. In conjunction with a traditional web service, Activeweave leverages the add-on it built for the Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer browsers to provide its users with always-on, in-place access to information relevant to the page they are currently viewing.