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Shift Space, is an open source layer above any web page on the face of the Internet. The service seeks to extend the Internet by allowing users to annotate and modify web pages. These annotations are added as a layer on top of the original web pages. Shift Space helps users in these annotations by providing tools to artists, architects, developers, students, researchers and pretty much everyone.
Shift Space is a firefox extension that is available as a free download from ShiftSpace.org. The extension offers a number of Spaces (tools) to manipulate Shifts (annotations) on a web page.
Some of the spaces released include Notes-which allows users to leave post-it notes on websites, Highlights-which allows users to highlight text on web pages, ImageSwap-which allows users to grab any image from the web and swap it in place of another image, and SourceShift-which allows users to edit the HTML code of the web page and see it differently from what the original developer had intended.
When a user who has Shift Space extension installed visits a page that has been modified, he will be able to see a small (§) icon in the bottom left side of the screen. When this is encountered the modified version of the web page could be viewed by hitting Shift+Space keys.
The users have the option to keep their Shifts private or can make them public, if they choose to. The public shifts are aggregated on ShiftSpace.org. Shift Space also allows users to subscribe to the Shifts of activities of other users by subscribing to their Shift RSS feed.
Shift Space is implemented using Javascript, PHP and SQLite. Social features are in the working and so is the move to migrate the architecture to P2P. Hopefully shifting to P2P would allow them to avoid the problems that Twitter is facing in terms of scaling its architecture.
In recent times we have seen immense activity in social sharing space with the rise of services like Twitter, which allows you to share with users about what you are doing right now, and LifeStreaming services like UStream.tv. Shift Space now opens a new avenue for social sharing, allowing users to share what they online. In short its like Google Reader’s “share with note” feature but with a slight difference, it allows you to annotate and share the entire web, not just RSS feeds in your feed reader.
Embedded below is an introductory video of Shift Space.
