When you are working as part of a team on a research project, there are plenty of online collaboration tools you can use to share your discoveries in real-time with your colleagues. Screensharing technology allows you to take others on a tour of webpages as you visit them - they see on their screens exactly what you're seeing. Glance and GoToMeeting are two commercial offerings we've recommended in the past.

Simply showing your colleagues any webpage is one thing, but being able to add your own context to the page - your thoughts about specific features, whether it be particular words, sentences, paragraphs, graphics, or links, would be very powerful. Being able then to have your colleagues add additional comments, edit previous remarks or create new annotations, in an instant messaging/chat type dialogue box would transform the entire process into a real productivity enhancer.

Gibeo enables you to do all this - and more.

Having found a webpage you want to work on collaboratively, you GibIt!, which automatically adds the extension .gibeo.net to the page's URL. Each page then contains a set of options that you can use when you select any text on that page.

The options allow you to instantly highlight that selection in different colours as 'important', 'wrong' or 'cool'. You can then annotate those selections, as well as instantly share the selection and URL with your colleagues via IM, email, RSS, your blog, or bookmark it for later.

Unlike collaborative bookmarking tools, such as del.icio.us and furl, which allow anyone to see your bookmarks, Gibeo permits you to select only the particular people you want to see them. You can also open up your pages to the entire world, should you wish.

The ability to share pages on a by-invitation-only basis makes this an especially useful tool when working on confidential projects.

Gibeo is open and free and is being continuously developed and enhanced by The Gibeo Network, "a rapidly growing community" of developers. Recommended.