First Look: Marginize

Monday Aug 23, 2010 by Nathan Burke - Marketing Manager, Aprigo

Sometimes it is difficult to change your own prejudices. The moment I heard about Marginize, an app that lets anyone comment on any web page, my knee-jerk reaction was “Really? Another one of those?”  In the past few years, dozens of apps have attempted to get people to comment on the “margins” of pages using plugins, extensions, and browser add-ons.  Adoption was always a problem, and most services faded into obscurity. But Marginize might be different.

The idea that became Marginize came from Ziad Sultan, an investment analyst at Longworth Ventures in Waltham. Rather than taking the typical startup route, Sultan took a very different approach. “I was an analyst at Longworth, working on the investment side. I started this project completely on the side, nights and weekends using my own money because I felt there was an opportunity to augment the web," said Sultan from

the Marginize office in Cambridge. “While I was working as an investment professional at Longworth, I started Marginize, created a prototype, and started convincing people that this wasn’t the stupidest idea on the planet. Then I got into the TechStars program in the spring, and I just used it as an opportunity to spend more time on it. I worked with Longworth, who was very supportive, and we switched my role to EIR (entrepreneur in residence), so my job is to build this company, though I’m still employed by Longworth and I still participate in all the investment activity, but the bigger part of my role is actually building Marginize, and later Longworth ended up investing.“

Just last week, Marginize announced a $650,000 seed round that included Longworth and Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of Hubspot. Though I didn’t press too much for details on how the money would be spent, Sultan said that “The next couple of months are going to be a little experimental in terms of where to grow the team.”

When asked about the timing of Marginize and why he thinks it will succeed where many others have failed, Sultan raised some really interesting points. “If you think about it today, there’s a one-to-one interaction between you – as a visitor to a page – and the publisher of that page. I think for a while, people wanted there to be a space out there that was parallel to the publisher, which is why it’s been tried so much in the past. So to me, twitter is the key to the timing question. When I figured out that there were billions of tweets with URLs that could be used to pre populate the space, I just decided to do it.”

“My belief is that the main obstacle – and it’s not the only one – is that if you create a tool for commenting that isn’t on the page, what you really need is millions of users of the tool before it becomes valuable. The web is a pretty big place, and the chances of just running into somebody on the same page are very low.  So you need millions of users before it’s useful, and it won’t be useful until you get millions of users, so you get the chicken and egg problem,” added Sultan.

To fight the chicken and egg problem, Marginize has employed two seemingly simple strategies that just might make it a game-changer, both revolving around Twitter. First, Marginize tackled the lack of content problem by prepopulating the comments on pages with twitter posts.

Above is a screenshot of how Marginize looks on a page using the Google Chrome extension. You’ll notice that Marginize aggregates twitter comments that have linked to that page, with links to the twitter users that have posted about the page.

This leads to the second user adoption strategy used by Marginize: each time you check-in or post a reaction to a page, you have to post to either twitter or facebook. At first I didn’t like the idea that if I wanted to react to a page, I had to send that comment to either twitter or facebook. To me, it made me reluctant to keep using it, as I didn’t want to flood my news stream with page comments. But Sultan’s reasoning is both sound and ingenious. “The reason fits into our bigger philosophy of reducing spam and useless comments. The first step is to force you to use an account that you respect like a facebook or twitter account. You’re less likely to write useless stuff. And you’re likely to already want to share that with friends. Right now it’s a way to help you spread the word, and at the same time it makes you stand by your comment.”

Aside from keeping people honest, forcing comments to be spread on twitter is a brilliant buzz-generating tactic that creates an avalanche effect. Every time someone reacts to a page using Marginize, all of their friends see a mar.gy link. When they click that link, rather than just going to the page in question, instead they’re taken to a “Marginized” version of the page, showing exactly what the page would look like if the visitor had the browser extension installed. Now that’s a beautiful thing.

A Marginize check-in as it appears on twitter.

After trying out the service, I realized that – given enough users and reactions – Marginize sits on a gold mine of data for trending and showing which pages are hot at any given time. Aside from the app itself, Marginize could parse that user data and become a great place to discover interesting pages on the web. I asked about the potential for discovery and how that will expand. “What’s more interesting – if you’re interested in discovery – is that you have both user profiles and site profiles. You can click on your own picture to see where you’ve been, and you can click on any site to see what kind of Marginize activity has happened there. If you go to my profile, you can discover a lot of stuff. You can see that I checked in to the NYTimes web site. You click on NYTimes, and you can see all the other people that have gone there. You can then keep discovering by clicking on both users and sites,” added Sultan.

The Bottom Line

I like Marginize an awful lot, both from the user side and the startup marketing side. Before this week, if you told me I’d write a glowing review of an app that lets users comment on pages, I’d call you a liar. An insane, weird liar. But I’d be wrong. Marginize is fun, taking a lot of the competitive spirit of location-based apps like foursquare. It is a way to discover both new people and new sites of interest. As a publisher, it’s great to see the people that have talked about your specific pages, and is yet another opportunity to engage with readers.

And I keep shaking my head at the subtle viral brilliance of making each reaction public on twitter or facebook and using mar.gy links to emulate the Marginize experience for people unfamiliar with the service. I was extremely impressed when talking to Ziad Sultan, as I could hear the passion and the absolute belief in the potential for the future of Marginize. I’m a sucker for startup ideas that grow from a nights and weekends hobby to something bigger. I’m an even bigger sucker when that startup attempts to tackle a problem that many others have tried and failed at solving. I’m pulling for Marginize, and I think they might just do it.

Nathan Burke is the Marketing Manager at Waltham, MA startup Aprigo. He is an infrequent writer at both Blogstring.com and MarketingStartups.com and is uncomfortable describing himself in the third person in italics at the end of an article. You can find him on twitter at @nathanwburke. 

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