Anyone remember that web technology that overlaid data onto another site's pages?

[kranky]

A while back there was a fuss about a technology that made it possible to overlay data onto another web site's pages. I can't remember if you went through one site to get to the others or if it worked in a different way.

To make up an example, a financial site could have a page with some investing advice. The other site would collect comments from users (let's say people who disagreed with certain points the author made). If you used this technology, you could go to the the financial site's page and see the users comments overlaid on the investing page. It was like marking up web pages, and others could see your markups.

The fuss was made because site owners felt it misled people into thinking the comments were on the site owners' pages and not coming from a third party.

Anyone remember that and what it was called?

 

[WannaFly]

RSS?

 

[Twista]

feed?

example

 

[kranky]

I don't know if it could be done with RSS, but what I'm thinking about was pre-RSS days.

Can you do it with RSS? Let's say you and a bunch of others want to do movie reviews. Instead of starting your own site, you use the technology to "mark up" the reviews at imdb. Then the people who want to could go to imdb and see not only the imdb review, but the comments you and/or others have "left" on the imdb page. Obviously it wouldn't affect everyone, just those who did (whatever you have to do - go through another site first, or whatever) to see the original web page with the comments. And you don't need the cooperation of the site owner (not that you'd get it anyway).