Comments are taking on a life of their own now as Facebook Connect and other modes of commenting communication become increasingly popular. Comments are evolving into what some say are “social gestures,” instead of conventional comments and these gestures are taking place all over the web, not just on a publisher’s site. Just look at the amount of reTweets a popular TechCrunch article gets on Twitter-it can reach into the thousands. JS-Kit, a company that offers an array of Javascript-based commenting, polling, and ratings widgets, is launching a new commenting product at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp that is designed to change the way users comment and the way publishers interact with comments. Echo, JS-Kit’s real-time streaming commenting widget, aggregates any Tweets, Diggs, or FriendFeed updates that a commenter is making about a webpage and pulls it into the stream. Here’s the live stream feed of the event.
I had the opportunity to demo the widget and it’s pretty cool. Echo’s technology will crawls social networks and sites including Twitter, for the url links to an article or post on a site (it even is able to discover shortened urls) and then reassembles the comments from the web into the widget’s real-time stream.
On the flip side, Echo allows hyper distribution from the actual widget itself. The commenting functionality looks exactly like an email. You first identify yourself either as a guest, your Twitter handle, your Facebook profile, your blog, and more. You the are given the option to hyper-distribute your comment to a variety of social net works and sites including Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious. JS-Kit hasn’t added Facebook to the distribution channel yet.
JS-Kit’s co-founder and CEO Khris Loux told us that the startup has been using the commenting widget internally for some time now and it has changed the way people interact with comments. He says that the ability to use the widget to make a comment on another social network spreads the conversation and makes it viral. Loux adds that although commenting is updating in real-time in a stream, Echo has intense spam protection, community moderation, and filtering abilities to prevent spam or inappropriate comments from getting through.
This product is sure to bolster JS-Kit’s presence in the commenting widget arena. The startup has been steadily growing, acquiring fellow competitors SezWho and Haloscan over the past year. The company has also developed partnerships with a number of major companies, including Sun and World Now. But JS-Kit faces strong competition from Automattic, which acquired commenting system IntenseDebate, which is being incorporated into incorporated Automattic’s popular blogging platform WordPress.
Here’s the video of the demo of Echo at the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp:
Enought already with this ‘realtime stream ‘ rubbish.
Just like web2.0 was all rubbish and marketing.
I think as “real time” increases, productivity of most workers proportionately decreases (anyone whose job is not directly in social media that is).
ehhhh just a buzz word.
I think it really depends on if a website or blog needs to have “real time” commenting. Some sites have “Live chat” customer service, so it king of performs the same thing albeit a tad slower and cheaper for the site owner to maintain. Time will tell just like every other web innovation.
nuff said,
B~
love the “ustream…uh, youtube” competing watermarks.
Congratz to Khris Loux and everyone at JS-Kit for launching Echo! Looks awesome. One question though: how do I moderate this wonderful new content now?
@Steve,
Echo has all our old commenting features – including bad word checking and enterprise moderation tools on the back end
Also the community can flag items and ‘x’ items (set by the publisher) will remove those items.
is there a business here or just dime a dozen?
There are quite a lot commenting tools already.
this appears to be quite different. we’re going to spend some time with it next week and i may have additional thoughts. there is definitely some there there.
disqus has been offering “reactions” for a few months now. i have it on my blog. it just adds all the social media reactions to a post to the end of the comment thread. you can see it here Mike. just scroll down to the end of the comment thread. you’ll see twitter and friend feed reactions to the post
http://www.avc....or-twitter.html
Ah. I stand corrected
but it isn’t real time, right? i thought discus required a refresh.
Yeah, we’ve been doing this for about 4 months now. And with a dozen more services in addition to Twitter and FriendFeed.
I’m not sure if constantly polling for new items versus reloading the page constitutes “real time”, but I agree that it’s a nice touch that we can take a cue from.
It would be very nice to have a more social commenting system on TechCrunch. I really like Disqus and think it would solve a lot of the problems. Like, it’s almost impossible to see all the posts you’ve commented on and check for responses in one place.
On another note, it might be a good idea to give Echo a try!
I might try this out sometime, but not sure how helpful it will be just yet.
Hasn’t Disqus been doing this for a while already?
A comparison of these comment systems wouldn’t go amiss but afaik Disqus is a user-centric system showing a specific readers comment trail while this js-kit sounds publisher-centric i.e. all comments about the article.
Nope, publisher-centric.
I was sure something like this would come to the Web this year. Until some commenting utility or site comes up, or we can take advantage of more advanced technologies like SIOC, i like owning my comments with FB connect. This would do for the time being
awesome, BTW
never had a chance to try it yet, because i’m still in loved with WordPress comment default.
What a bunch of BS. The guy who was talking sounded like a Z-list actor who overdramatizes everything.
“THE COMMENTS ARE DEAD”.. “IS ANYONE AWAKE?”
LMAO! This guy is clearly a fool.
Reminds me of Google Wave …
Oh yeah, come on make commenting better, what’s next are we going to see.
Harsh comments- tough crowd
Leena, I can count at least 4 grammatical/spelling errors in this post. Come on, I expect better from TechCrunch.
Minor correction: there’s nothing “real time” about crawling. Latency is an inherent aspect of crawling.
Sounds good to me, though it looks like it’ll be going head to head with Google Wave and Google Friend Connect which I can’t say is a good thing.
Plus who knows whether or not Disqus or Intense Debate will enter this area (my guess is it’s very likely) plus Facebook may upgrade their comment box widget to be real time.
All in all it’s a great product, but I doubt the competition will just idle around.