Social media man­agers who are used to (and a lit­tle bored with) the con­ven­tion of user com­ments being con­fined to the bot­tom of the page are in for pleas­ant sur­prise: San Fran­cis­co-head­quar­tered social engage­ment start­up Live­fyre, which has offices in New York and Lon­don, is bring­ing user com­ments into the con­tent itself, cour­tesy of its ground­break­ing new prod­uct, the apt­ly-named Sidenotes.

Com­ments live

If that’s whet­ted the curios­i­ty of social media man­agers look­ing for live­ly inter­ac­tive inno­va­tions here’s how it works: when pub­lish­ers using the prod­uct turn it on, a lit­tle word bal­loon, the Side­notes icon, will appear beside every para­graph on the page (it also works for images). When users tap the icons on their smart­phone screens, oth­er user com­ments will emerge in thread­ed con­ver­sa­tions at the spe­cif­ic points of the con­tent that elicit­ed the user inter­est and response. The com­ments open up in small win­dow in the low­er part of the screen, and you can move between com­ments by swip­ing. And, of course, you can add a com­ment of your own.

To pre­vent a dis­tract­ing excess of bal­loon icons, they’re tied to whole para­graphs, but users have the option of tying their par­tic­u­lar com­ments to any spe­cif­ic bit of the text. There’s also an upvote/downvote sys­tem, so you get to see the best com­ments first.

Future plans

Live­fyre founder and CEO, Jor­dan Kretch­mer, has ambi­tious plans for the new approach to com­ments that Side­notes rep­re­sents: his larg­er goal, he says, is to turn “the entire web, every major media com­pa­ny in the world” into “a giant, anno­tat­able canvas.”

But he’s no ego­ma­ni­ac; he’s well aware that he’s got a lit­tle per­suad­ing to do before the approach real­ly catch­es on, so he’s bring­ing pub­lish­ers on board by stay­ing with some­thing more tra­di­tion­al (by which he means the orig­i­nal Live­fyre social engage­ment plat­form for brands).

He believes, though, that Side­notes has the poten­tial to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the con­ven­tion­al for­mat for com­ments, and will result in more and more peo­ple feel­ing inspired to post because it’s a lot less intim­i­dat­ing to respond to a spe­cif­ic  piece of con­tent than to the whole nine yards. Plans are in the pipeline to enable users to post com­ments tied to time­stamped bits of videos, too.

We think most social media mangers will agree that this could take off big time.