I just pulled my old dead-trees copy of the classic Fucked Companies book off the shelf to remind myself of the one I remembered dying in the first dotcom era:
Yep, Third Voice is the one I was writing about in '99.
What's interesting is that Genius seems to have run into the same brick wall Third Voice did: people who make Web sites really hate having randos mark them up. See, for instance, these two articles on Genius from last year:
The complaints in those pieces are exactly the same ones that people were making about Third Voice back in the '90s. Exactly the same. And Genius' defense ("But your blog is public!") is exactly the same too.
I feel like maybe there's just a fundamental issue of empathy here: the kind of person who launches an annotation startup can't understand the complicated emotions the kind of person who writes in public has about their writing. So they keep stepping on toes by barging in too strongly, instead of looping the content creators in early to get them on board (or at least figure out how to make an annotation product that doesn't offend their sensibilities too much).
The last paragraph in that kind of makes me cry a little inside. Apparently if I want to get a normal job at a tech company, I need to be able to implement R-star on a whiteboard under pressure, but if I want to be CEO all I had to do was invent chewy granola bars...
https://m.imgur.com/dD4nOol