Comments Dead, Twitter Holds Smoking Gun
At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.
Loux took the opportunity to introduce Echo - his new product that allows publishers to embed a simple JavaScript widget and aggregate social media and blog dialogue from across the web. This means that all of the related posts from Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Digg, WordPress and Blogger end up below your post for the world to see.
For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.
Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."
This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Looks like an interesting tool.
Hasn't Disqus done this for ages?
What a shame we can't use it to comment on this article...
I wonder whether this could also kill forums?
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Why would anyone want to embed outgoing links to external discussion? Not only you passing link juice to possible competitors, it is very likely that after reading your post visitors will leave your site. It makes a lot more sense to put links of relevant content from your blog instead of loosing all that hard-earned incoming traffic.
In regards to comments vs. tweets - my technology news aggreagator (tFeeder.com) uses retweets mainly as a measure of story popularity, but when it comes to calculate how 'hot' a story is in realtime, I take both comments and retweets into accounts. Comments are still more insightful than tweets, which provide very little added info other than the link (140 ch. limit).
I also have a feeling that there's gonna be a lot of Twitter link spamming (similar to early days comments spamming on blogs).
Are elevating your game and becoming gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation necessarily mutually exclusive?
Doesn't seem to be killing comments (from looking at the demo) just enhancing them. @tFeeder How would you be passing link equity to competitors? (unless possibly your competitor mentions your URL along with theirs to get a link to their site posted on your page...possible I guess) But it seems Echo only aggregates external posts/tweets that link back to you. As far as them leaving the site that is possible (going to twitter to join a conversation) but you run that any social bookmarker as well.
Peter C, Disqus (http://disqus.com/)does have a similar tool called Reactions; however, their conversation feed does not sit in one long thread. They've got a great tool as well. It just depends on how you prefer to see the dialogue.
Reframe It (www.reframit.com) has been doing similar stuff for almost 9 months now. You can ad a widget/RSS and it is persistent in that comments can be made, and seen in context on any web page without permission of the owner. Of course you can automatically have your comments feed to Facebook, Twitter, Blogg, etc.
Disclaimer: I am a VP of Biz. Dev. at Reframe It.
I think that this could be useful tool for everyone. Sure you are probably going to run the risk of visitors leaving. However if you are commenting on topics that are relevant to your business or industry, the viral capacity can be huge.
http://stevenpr.com
I've played around with the idea of using Twitter as comments on my website before but ended up deciding against it, not just because of the difficulty actually implementing it but because many of the readers of my blog don't use Twitter. But, something like this might actually change my mind.
I've played around with the idea of using Twitter as comments on my website before but ended up deciding against it, not just because of the difficulty actually implementing it but because many of the readers of my blog don't use Twitter. But, something like this might actually change my mind.
http://www.binbango.com/?p=328037
I will at least have to examine the notion of getting a close tie to twitter