ShiftSpace provides a transparent social layer above any website. It is an Open Source (and free software) platform that enables users to comment, add to, and modify websites to create a truly public
online space. ShiftSpace allows artists, developers, poets, activists and others to freely meet, play, create art, debate protest and enjoy the full potential of their online freedom.

ShiftSpace is not the first meta-web application. Third Voice was an early attempt to allow site-specific annotations, but it was not open source and allowed only one form of modification. The company went out of business in 2001. Greasemonkey is a plug-in environment that allows hackers to inject code into websites, but it is not user friendly and does not have a social network of users or an aggregation interface. ShiftSpace uses Greasemonkey\'s architecture (as the underlying platform) and adds on it to create a compelling meta-web platform.

Theory Books & Essays:
Guy Debbord, \'Society of the Spectacle\'
Lasn Kalle, \'Culture Jam\'
Jürgen Habermas, \'The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article\'
Michel Foucault, \'Of Other Spaces\'
Stuart Hall, \'Encoding/decoding\'
Vannevar Bush, \'As We May Think\'
Adam Curtis, \'Century of the Self\'

Net Art Inspiration:
Mark Napier, \'Shredder\' & \'Riot\' [potatoland.com]
Christophe Bruno, \'The Google Adwords Happening\' [www.iterature.com/adwords]
Michael Mandiberg, \'Oil Standards\' [turbulence.org/Works/oilstandard]

Community building and Social Software Inspiration/Research:
Upgrade International [www.theUpgrade.net]
Hoodwink\'d [hoodwinkd.hobix.com]
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Technology Inspiration/Research:
Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox [greasemonkey.mozdev.org]
Third Voice [discontinued pioneering metaweb application 1999-2001]
Book Burro plugin for Firefox [bookburro.org]
Google News [news.google.com]
The Freehaven Project - P2P technology [www.freehaven.net]

social software users, students, professors, developers, hachers, activists, artists, poets...

Dan Phiffer and I are developing ShiftSpace, a plug-in for the Firefox browser. When a webpage is requested by the browser, ShiftSpace manipulates the code of the page to allow special applications to work within it. These applications for ShiftSpace are called Spaces and the bits of content generated by its users are called Shifts.
One such Space is Notes which allows ShiftSpace users to leave annotations on websites that resemble post-it notes. Another Space is ImageSwap which allows users to grab any image on the web and swap it in place of any another image.
When a user gets to a modified (\'Shifted\') webpage, the small ShiftSpace icon (§) pops up in the bottom left side of the screen to let the user know that there are Shifts on the page. The user can then press the keyboard keys + to launch the ShiftSpace console.
The console allows the user to browse through the Shifts (modifications) and to use any installed Space (tool) to create her own Shifts. A social networking system built into the console will allow the user to define ShiftSpace friends and choose to see Shifts in four ways: her own authored shifts, her friends Shifts, her friends\' friends Shifts, and those of the rest of the user community. The system allows users to rate Shifts, giving them a \'Shift-Up\' (good) or \'Shift-Down\' (bad), or if necessary flagging them as Spam.
Other spaces under development are: Write Between The Lines—a tool for doing just that Collabrowsers—turns every webpage into a chat room, Netraset—a tool to create graphic collages over websites and several new approaches to interactive storytelling—that use the site specific legacy of performance and public art.

ShiftSpace is a Firefox plug-in built on the architecture of the Greasemonkey plug-in and based extensively on Javascript. The back-end is build in PHP.