Last week we opened our DotSpots beta to much fanfare at TC50, but almost immediately, even before the virtual ink had dried off of Mike Arrington’s post, people started comparing DotSpots to the once legendary start-up, Third Voice.

For those of you who may not know, Third Voice was a web annotation plug-in that launched in 1999 and generated a lot of buzz… However, by 2001, amid the implosion of the internet bubble, the service, by then replete with spam and unable to find a business model, fell into the deadpool.

Anyhow, the gist of most of the criticism was that, if Third Voice had tried some form of browser-based annotation system, 10 years ago and they failed, then how could DotSpots hope to succeed today?

Our answer was to remind everyone that great ideas can sometimes fail because of poor timing and we thought that Third Voice was a great example of just that… They were simply too far ahead of their time.  The web was not ready for user generated content at that level… services like Facebook and Twitter not to mention Blogger and WordPress had not yet started to make their mark… Heck, even Google was still in its infancy.

The web we have today is far different and we feel the time is right for this great idea to see it’s day in the sun, implemented properly with great controls for publishers, spam detection to weed out the junk and seamless integration into social media for broad distribution.

The big idea is that with the above taken care of, people of all walks of life and passion can be empowered  to share their thoughts, collaborate with each other and help distribute truth of the people, by the people and for the people.  This sounds kinda important, because it is.

After all, we live in the information age, and here in the U.S., our most prized civil right, the first amendment of the U.S. constitution, is the right to freedom of speech, assembly and press!  It is a right to information.

We literally live in a time when information, in the split of a second, can zoom around and change people’s minds; bring people to understanding and prevent wars…  So, there truly has never been a time as ready for the idea behind Third Voice — or public annotation systems that allow great thoughts and ideas to be quickly distributed — as today.

This is why we are so excited to see that Google is throwing in its weight behind this idea too with the release of SideWiki.

While their implementation is significantly different than ours in its focus — i.e. they are going more web-wide with simpler comment-style annotations, while we are focused on helping improve the news with evolving, distributed objects of thought (or dots) which are each like collaborative mini-blog posts — we see Google’s release of a public annotation system as an essential stamp of approval that here is an idea whose time has come.

Having spoken with members of the Google SideWiki team I know that they are thinking the same thing, and together we shall be forging a path to giving this worthy idea another go and seeing where it can take humanity!

We’ve written this post in honor of the “International Day of Peace.” As an annual day of celebration, it is perhaps one of the most important days of the year. This day serves as a reminder to all who may be involved in conflict and strife, wherever they may be in the world, that peace remains attainable.

It’s an important day for DotSpots as well, as the concept of a dot or “distributed object of thought” was borne out of an inspiration to alleviate global misunderstandings that lead to conflict. In fact, that concept is so core to our mission at DotSpots, that we’ve made it figure prominently in our own logo from the beginning As dots proliferate throughout the world, we hope to do our part in helping to bring about global peace, one dot at a time.

We believe that whatever the cause of a given conflict in the world, there is no dispute that cannot be resolved through mutually respectful dialogue and thoughtful and open person to person communication. Institutions and media (as the word itself implies) often step in and “mediate” that direct human to human communication, pushing their own agendas and points of view, not allowing human values and similarities to shine through. However, it is precisely the sort person to person communication that dots in particular, and social media in general, are designed to facilitate.

While our recent launch has been fun and we’re excited about all of the interest from citizen journalists, bloggers and publishers, our ambitions are much greater. To us, DotSpots can become one component of a set of tools that peace-loving people (that is, the vast majority of humanity) can use to facilitate dialogue and help spread the people’s truth, humanity’s goals and all of our truest hopes to each other. When people who might previously have never spoken with each other, out of hatred or fear created by institutional forces and media, choose to create dots and share their points of view, it is then that the true value of what we are building today will be realized.

So, on this day, as the U.N’s peace bell inscription so beautifully exclaims: “Long live absolute world peace!” we’re posting to say “here here!”

Just a quick note to say that we’ll be at the TC50 Demo pit this Monday and Tuesday (September 14th and 15th).

We were also featured on TechCrunch today: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/been-waiting-for-dotspots-come-and-get-it/

Please stop by and say hi!

Best,

Farhad.