Features

Annotations

Most people think of annotations as notes attached to webpages. In Byblos, annotations solve three practical problems: organizing pages, finding pages again later, and discussing pages with other people.

Sort and Filter

A browser treats webpages as URLs. Byblos treats webpages as objects that can accumulate information. Ratings, keywords, measurements, costs, priorities, reactions, and notes become properties of a page rather than information that lives somewhere else.

Once information is attached to pages, it can be used to organize them. Vacation listings can be sorted by cost. Research papers can be filtered by topic. Products can be ranked by rating. Pages that would otherwise look identical to the browser become distinguishable because they carry context.

Re-finding Pages

People do not remember URLs. They remember context. They remember the Airbnb listing with the pool. The paper about P. gingivalis. The startup that Bob liked. The article that contained an important chart.

Annotations create retrieval hooks. When you leave ratings, keywords, notes, reactions, or measurements on a page, you make it easier to find later. The page is no longer identified only by its URL. It can also be identified by what you left on it.

Annotations also preserve who left them and when. A note written by Alice six months ago often means something different from a note written yesterday. Over time, pages accumulate history as well as information.

Discussion

Most conversations about webpages happen somewhere else. A link is shared in WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, email, or a group chat. The discussion survives and the page survives, but the relationship between them gradually disappears.

Byblos keeps discussions attached to the pages they describe. When somebody returns to a page, the discussion is still there. When somebody shares a page, the discussion comes with it. New participants can understand not only the page itself, but also what other people thought about it.

Discussions become part of the page's context rather than a separate stream of messages that must be reconstructed later.

The Big Idea

Annotations are not just notes. They become part of how pages are organized, discovered, and discussed. The value of an annotation is not only the information it contains. It is the role that information plays throughout the rest of the workspace.