Android: Photo-taking and annotation app Skitch has added a new feature that lets you annotate maps and send them to your friends—perfect for giving directions or pointing out specific locations with a picture message. More »

width="640" height="300" src="http://www.springwise.com/img/uploads/2011/12/wishbox.jpg" class="attachment-main-size wp-post-image" alt="alttext" title="Online tool enables faster, more concise website feedback" />

Whether giving feedback to a designer during the build of a website, or contacting a business because their website isn’t clear, many web users find that putting their suggestions into words can be tricky. Hoping to make that a problem of the past, a new online feedback tool — href="http://www.jotform.com/wishbox">Wishbox — enabes users to modify, annotate and crop specific web pages.

Wishbox was launched last month as a simple way for businesses to communicate with their customers and better manage their web design projects. Websites using Wishbox display a small, unobtrusive “feedback” button to the side of their page. When visitors click on this, they are then able to add annotations and drawings to a screenshot of the web page, enabling them to give faster and more precise feedback. href="http://www.jotform.com"class="unbold">Jotform — the engine running behind Wishbox — enables site owners to embed customizable forms and question for users to fill in as part of this feedback. Once comments are submitted, the site owner is notified by email and can reply to the sender. Wishbox is compatible with all websites, requires only an email address from those making comments, and allows 100 free feedback submissions per month. After that pricing is based on the number of monthly submissions. The video below shows Wishbox in more detail:

src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/32270543?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffc000" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen>

Those working in web design or customer services: one to try out in order to obtain smoother and more concise communication from customers?

Website: href="http://www.jotform.com/wishbox">www.jotform.com/wishbox /> Contact: href="http://www.jotform.com/contact">www.jotform.com/contact

Spotted by: Aytekin Tank

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Google announced better support for webmasters to communicate their multilingual content to Google with a new link element markup.

Googler, Pierre Far, said on Google +:

Do you work with multiregional or multilingual websites? Whether you use the same content on all sites (with minor differences, say localized pricing) or you fully translate your content, you can now annotate pages to help us consolidate the signals of such pages and also help us show the correct regional page to users in search.

Here is how it works:

Imagine you have an English language page hosted at http://www.example.com/, with a Spanish alternative at http://es.example.com/. You can indicate to Google that the Spanish URL is the Spanish-language equivalent of the English page in one of two ways:

• HTML link element. In the HTML section of http://www.example.com/, add a link element pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage at http://es.example.com/, like this:

  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />

• HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL:

  Link: <http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es"

If you have multiple language versions of a URL, each language page in the set must use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" to identify the other language versions. For example, if your site provides content in French, English, and Spanish, the Spanish version must include a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link to both the English and the French versions, and the English and French versions must each include a similar link pointing to each other and to the Spanish site.

Forum discussion at Google +.

Image credit: Globe icon from ShutterStock.

iPad: Noteshelf is a finely polished handwriting app with loads of features including 17 notebook templates, the ability to embed and annotate photos, over 450 icons, and automatic syncing to Dropbox and Evernote. More »

• Triposo – know where to go
  
  This seems like an app I can use (for iPhone, Android): We build free, interactive travel guides for mobile devices. To make our guides we use the content that is freely available from seven different sources, including Wikitravel, Wikipedia, World66 and Openstreetmap. Our mission is to make that content relevant for you. So we mix and mash and annotate – and we distill great, relevant travel guides out of it.

Two days ago our beta request site went live

Late Friday afternoon we soft-launched our teaser website and have been blown away by the interest we’ve seen so far. The teaser site was put together in just six days (from zero to live) to have a placeholder while in stealth mode. I’m proud of the passion and experience the team brought to deliver such quality in so litte time. It’s still very early but we thought we’d share some quick stats and lessons learned so far.

Early results

We’re super happy with the results so far. The big surprise is having more than 10% conversion from visitor to sign up, given the fact people had extra obstacles (we ask for Linkedin authorization). Also, folks have spent an average of about 2 minutes per visit, so they’re spending time with the story.

Productivity tools we used:

The teaser site started while we were literally around the world from each other (I was in Bali for my wedding). Being 15 hours and +1 day away from each other made for around-the-clock work. Not surprisingly, we used these same tools even when we ended up in the same office.

Skitch

We’re fans (and friends) with the guys at Skitch, which is the ultimate visual grok machine– a super rapid way to asynchronously collaborate on the stuff on your screen. Just snap a pic of a part of your screen or drag a url into the app, annotate on top of it, and click “share.” Skitch then gives you a url you can share with anyone who can see just what you mean in seconds. Here’s a pic of one day of my Skitch history.

Evernote

I had never used folders or even shared folders before in Evernote. My personal Evernote is just one massive dump of inspiration or forget-me-nots, so this was the first time I had used Evernote collaboratively. We had a number of shared folders set up to grab inspiration, work on the script, and pull a-lot of our formative assets.

Dropbox

File sharing and iteration really hit hard the last 3 days (out of 6) as the web assets were getting assembled and needed to be in one place. As we gave feedback or changes to Jason (our designer), he’d simply replace the file in Dropbox so we always had the most up-to-date stuff.  Matt & team then used a script to automatically pull the latest and publish to the sandbox environment. From new graphic update to sandbox typically took < 1 minute.  This allowed us to review and approve new updates, within the live site structure, instantaneously.

Github

Matt & team had over 230 commits to GitHub over the 6 days it took to build the teaser site and integrate with our back-end engine over REST.  Being this agile and leveraging a slew of new technologies required constant code review, merges, and sandbox pushes.  As we aggressively hire engineers (ping Matt if you got what it takes), we will continue to leverage GitHub’s distributed collaborative infrastructure to organize, store, share, and iterate on our fast evolving code base.

Inspiration

We wanted a way to tell the story of two ways to land business, so we imagined two different downtowns: Goosechase (the old way) and New Business City (the new way). Jason’s original visual inspiration for the city came from Grand Theft Auto for iPad (I attached his first screenshot). He then found some awesome scrolling interaction sites like Ben the Bodyguard, We Bleed Design, and  Bullet PR.

Vehicle-wise, we looked through Google at a number of cool steampunk-styled contraptions. Originally we were going to use more of a parade float for the “new business” side vehicle. For the final design, Jason fused a float with an iPhone.

Other sites with cool interaction design that inspired us:

• BountyBev
• Volll
• Alex Buga
• Orman Clark 
• Think Green Meeting

Lessons

As soon as we went live, a number of people reached out to help make our beta site better. One of them was our friend, Justin Kistner (who’s way smarter than we are when it comes to social media marketing).

He recommended a number of things:

- If we added the ability to comment on the FB like button we’ll get full posts with a picture and text (and folks see these posts more than others)

- We hadn’t thought through how to track twitter referrals from folks clicking links via the Twitter client.

- If we use campaign IDs on links from the Like button, our integration with LinkedIn could separate out how much traffic came from those sites because of links published from people seeing posts from those buttons vs. organic visits from those sites from people sharing without using our share buttons.

Reporting from here

We’ve made most of the recommended changes and will continue to respond to advice and ideas from those who want to help. You can bet that we’ll be sharing more official results once we’re further along. Thanks a ton to everyone for your feedback and support.