ReadWriteWeb

Over the past couple of years, we've seen multiple social browsing experiments launch with plans to unite online users to collaborate, chat, and connect as they visit various websites. Services like Me.dium and Browzmi debuted with much fanfare, but in practice, the take-up on them has been limited to a relatively small set of users. More recent initiatives, like Adaptive Blue's Glue, have fared a little better yet still seem to attract only the core audience of early adopters. Now a new service called Fytch aims to join this group with their "social commenting" service which allows you to leave comments on any website, whether or not that site supports comments or not. Will it do any better?

After a short private beta test, JS-Kit just announced that Echo, its new blog commenting platform, is now available as a public beta. Echo aggregates conversations around a blog post from across the Internet and allows users to share their comments on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. Echo offers a number of well-designed and unique features, including real-time updating and the ability to capture social gestures related to a blog's content like star ratings and 'likes' from across the Web. In addition, at least for the time being, JS-Kit also offers good spam and obscenity filters.