Think a moment of how Facebook works. Members of the social media network can make a post or share an article, reply to it, share it again, comment on it, etc. Who can see the post and those subsequent annotations depends on permissions set by the poster: specific friends, all friends and the public. Those comments and shares can be seen as a sort of commentary.

Barker sees the Facebook model working in the world of legal citation indexes in a few different ways.

• Collaborative annotations in the citator as a marketing tool. Lawyers, law professors and law students might welcome sharing their insight and commentary for the influence, authority and word of mouth they would build. Citator customers could even set up alerts to follow certain lawyers.
• Intelligent filtering: not all comments are desirable. Citators could use algorithms and sentiment analysis just like Facebook to surface the most valuable and relevant commentary.
• Wisdom of the crowd. Facebook enables likes, shares and comments to determine the most popular commentary. Citators could enable paying customers to vote. I differ with Barker here as I’d leave it open to the masses to capture the best sentiment with filters/algorithms eliminating the static.

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