In One Sentence

YayTrail allows you to click-and-type to edit any webpage in-line, and create a personalised web that is shareable with friends.

Elevator Pitch

Imagine opening your web browser and starting to read a news article. Now imagine your news article changes. Imagine the article is progressively enhanced by the insights of your friends and peers - people you trust and whose opinion you care about. Imagine these enhancements aren't just tucked away among a crowd of strangers in a comment section, but are made in-line with the original page - where the user sees fit. Imagine you could make the same enhancements with just a click of your mouse, wherever you wished.

This is the core vision of YayTrail. We want to promote your trusted friends and peers as first-class contributors and editors of your web, so their voice - and yours - are as important and accessible as you make them, and not inhibited by restrictions and the fractured nature of user content systems across the web today. We hope to radically disrupt and simplify user participation on the web today by making it user-to-user, universally available from one account, and by providing what we believe is an unprecedented level of control to the user.


Current Status

YayTrail is currently at an early preview stage at http://www.yaytrail.com. We have been testing with a small group of users for a number of months now.

Much of the core technology is in place, albeit in a less than final state. Users can currently engage in pure-text, in-line editing of html text on webpages, and personalise their view of the web by following users of interest (in a Twitter-style follow system). An 'inbox' shows users the most engaging webpages among their friends.

Our technology works inside the user's browser, at the moment served via an extension. Currently users are required to access YayTrail using Mozilla FireFox, however full support of all major browsers is in the works.

Much work is still to be done to fully realise our goals, however we are now at a stage where we are happy to invite you to give YayTrail a try and to solicit your feedback on the concept and the direction of our implementation.

Future

We are planning to formally launch YayTrail in early 2010 with a full media introduction. By that time we plan to have support for Internet Explorer, extension-less use, support for multimedia contributions (e.g. inserting pictures into pages), private editing between specific users (e.g. directing a edit to one of your followers only), and more. The editing tool itself will also undergo significant improvement, optimisation and user interface revision.

We wish to engage early with you so you can get to know us and our product, and so we can get to know you and how YayTrail could better serve your interests and needs. We hope you'll give YayTrail a try and get in touch to let us know what you think!

People & Contact Info

YayTrail is under development by Peter and Tom Kehoe.

Peter Kehoe

Peter is a 26 year-old software engineer based in Dublin, Ireland. Prior to working on YayTrail, Peter worked as a researcher in text and video processing at Dublin City University.

You can contact Peter via email at peterk@yaytrail.com

Tom Kehoe

Tom is an investment research manager based in London, engaged in YayTrail's business development and promotion.

You can contact Tom via email at tomk@yaytrail.com or by phone at +44 7825603404


You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/yaytrail or at our blog at http://yaytrail.blogspot.com/