Why do online commenting start-ups keep beating their heads against the same wall? Kutano, a browser add-on that lets users read, write and search comments side-by-side with any webpage, launched at DEMO today. With over one-third of the 1.574 billion internet users worldwide participating in online commentary and forums, Kutano is joining a slew of other start-ups hoping to capitalize on this growing trend by providing a free and open stage for online discussion.
As we wrote about last fall, there have been many online discussion add-ons and services developed to allow users to share unmoderated commentary on webpages, but very little traction for most of them.
Kutano’s technology doesn’t appear to be vastly different than its predecessors. Once Internet Explorer and Firefox users (Safari and Linux versions will be rolled out in Q2 2009) download the free add-on, a Kutano, collapsable “window” will be displayed to the right of the browser, which will show the discussions and information related to the specific subject (not by URL) of the web page that is being viewed. The add-on lets users comment on the website and also allows users to search and exchange information on any related commentary on the web (much like Reframe It). This serves to broaden the discussion, but also risks showing disjointed conversations.
Kutano, which means crowd or gathering in Swahili, integrates with Facebook and Twitter, giving users the ability to broadcast commentary on social networks. While Kutano offers users the ability to create specific subject-based commentary, competitor Reframe It provides many more social-networking features, including the ability to follow comments in a RSS feed and upload Gmail and Facebook contacts into the application.
Kutano will undoubtedly confront similar roadblocks that other commentary and Web annotation applications have experienced. The chance of coming across a website with commentary from Kutano users is small, making the side-panel somewhat useless. Like Reframe It, Kutano’s comments can only be seen by users who have downloaded Kutano to their browsers. And as free and open commentary becomes a staple of blogs and media sites, users tend to look and read comments and discussion sponsored by the blogs and news sites themselves. I’m skeptical that users will be looking for yet another open forum for comments and discussion relating to, for example, articles on The New York Times website.
Couldn’t agree more with the author’s point of view.
i agree
A way has to be found to make the app appealing even before a critical mass of posts appear or to speed up the process of reaching that critical mass.
Apps like Twitter and other microblogging networks could provide the required force multiplier though, e.g. a group of say 25 could quite easily seed Twitter to produce a massive response.
The key would be to get a million+ comments up as quickly as possible.
This has never been possible before which is why previous similar apps probably failed.
There was a superb one out of Israel which was literally a decade before its time.
Many will fall before a winner finally emerges, but only one can be first.
The ghost of ThirdVoice lives on…
It’s too hard.
To make this work you would have to give people ONE SINGLE LINE of javascript code, like Google Analytics to paste in the header file of their website.
Once there the javascript code would hack the DOM of the page it is in and insert a left or right column which would follow the conversation.
The libraries would be loaded dynamically from the host website and would scan the page DOM and use the processing on the server side with AJAX to provide the functionality.
It HAS to be this simple to work. Extensions are no go.
I *could* code this, pretty easily with JQuery, but I am doing more interesting things.
Steve, I think you got it right about Twitter and I think the Kutano people will agree with you. I tried it and one feature I think will draw Twitter users (if well communicated) is that every comment a user make can automatically update their Twitter status. This way they can send tweets as they browse the web, while broadcasting to Twitter and Kutano. There seem to be other Twitter related features, but I didn’t look in depth. Personally I’m not a heavy Twitter user and frankly I’m more of a “reader’ than a “writer” and as such Kutano is probably not of much use for me right now (I’ve uninstalled it). But I think it provides excellent utility to Twitter users, regardless the available content, which is admittedly lean right now. I think we’ll see many Twitter users make install it soon. Oh well, luck is always part of the game.
I agree – Kutano complements Twitter very nicely.
I think many Kutano users will come from Twitter, at least in the early days. This “Tweet as you browse” feature (where your comments update your Twitter status) will prove itself very useful and convenient to twitterers.
Kutano — even though it launched only today — already has almost a million comments and discussions (to Steve’s point above). Certainly there are websites that need populating, but I think that someone finally got this technology right. The subject page technology that Kutano has corrects most of the mistakes that previous others have encountered in the past.
So true!
As my wife is Kenyan, love the Swahili name, but what is the competitive advantage? Even more to the point, what is the incentive for the user to download the browser plugin and use it? Not all commentors are equal. Experience from Digg and other places shows that power commentors exist. Perhaps revenue share with the commentors is the answer but Kutano must come up with some sort of strategy to get up to critical mass first with commentors (without content the thing is useless) and then hopefully users.
I’d like to note that Reframe It has already been integrated with Twitter for some time now. Also, one critical difference between Reframe It and Kutano is that Reframe It lets people comment on specific paragraphs and sentences of text in context– Kutano does not allow this level of specificity.
Cheers,
-Bobby
reframeit.com
I agree that there is still work to be done but Kutano is still in its Beta version and I think has some real potential to move in exciting directions. For one and something unique to it is its slider at the bottom of the UI that allows you to see discussions completely specific to a webpage or more generally to a website. An added improved feature would be of course to have easy links to the specific page in each comment so that when a person looks at the website level view they can see what page is being commented on.
I am optimistic and LOVE the Twitter integration. Thus far I have been using Kutano largely for discussions on news sites and have also (JUST) started a Twitter News Group that keeps track of interesting Kutano news-related discussions I come across. For anyone interested my Twitter name is KuT_It_News (aka: the website above).
Kutano support:
Windows and Mac OS (new Rev – very soon – will support Linux)
Kutano Browser support:
IE7/8 and Firefox 3.x.x