Thousands of services are launched online every year and only a small number of those prove to have as much longevity. Today's new paradigm trailblazer will often be tomorrow's dead-end hassle for its developer. Such is the nature of a rapidly iterating web and such is the fate of Co.mments.

There's a reason why so many people start comment tracking companies - online comments are filled with valuable user data and there's a compelling human element to keeping track of responses to what you've said on blogs. It's not hard to imagine Facebook Connect owning this space within a year, though. We're cheering, none the less, for open standards in the portable identity, data and contacts sphere.

Co.mments hasn't announced any plan for users to export their data. Update: The company just posted instructions on how to export your tracking data.

Project founder Assaf Arkin has a day job as the CTO of open source business process management company Intalio. You can track his other development work at GitHub.

It is noteworthy that IntenseDebate's infrastructure goes far beyond being a simple commenting system. The service also includes profiles for commenters and spam control, which should integrate very well with Wordpress' own products.

A few of us here at RWW have used IntenseDebate in the past. Even though we liked the service overall, we found the reply by email function a bit lacking and undependable at times. Also, the plugin does not degrade well when commenting on a mobile device, though this is a typical problem with commenting plugins.

One feature we really like about IntenseDebate is that it supports OpenID, even though we called the actual integration "a bit clumsy" in an earlier review. IntenseDebate also stands out because it allows you to easily switch away from the service whenever you want to. You can just export your data and import it back into your native blogging software's comments database.

What About the Competition?

IntenseDebate's direct competitors include JS-Kit, SezWho, and Disqus, all of which have a very similar feature set. It will be interesting to see how these companies react to this news, especially because Automattic has also announced that WordPress 2.7 will implement some of IntenseDebate's features, including reply by email and threaded comments. Automattic's WordPress.com already hosts millions of blogs, and integrating IntenseDebate there might just make it the de facto standard for blog comments.

There are numerous updates to the Disqus site design. As of today, Disqus has went from this:

to this:

You'll notice that there is an entirely new layout and color scheme for everything. However, one thing fans of Disqus will appreciate is the emphasis that has been placed on the most important aspects of the service. For example, there's a lot more emphasis in the site design on management options for comments and threads. It's a lot easier to jump directly to the original comment's link and options that used to appear hidden are much more noticeable now.

A Shift in Perspectives

The site has also shifted to the user as the focal point instead of the sites that are being managed using Disqus. This could be due to the fact that users are starting to sign up to the Disqus service to claim their comments, but not integrate their commenting system into their blogs. In doing so, the profile page for Disqus users has an entirely new meaning and design. The profile page will now serve as a comment blog for users and the redesign only serves to confirm the shift.

Much More Under the Hood

Disqus as also released new APIs for developers to allow for deeper and better Disqus apps and integrations. New platform integrations include:

• SEO friendly comments


• Automatic data sync between Disqus and the local database


• Seamless import/export of old and new comments


• Comment moderation from the WordPress Admin

Disqus now hosts comments for over 30,000 websites. With a substantial amount of growth and backing from numerous major hitters including Robert Scoble and two writers from ReadWriteWeb, we expect to see more great things from Disqus in the future!

Evite's biggest challengers are probably not even other invitation services, but social networks like Facebook and MySpace. However, given that Evite is geared towards a very mainstream market where email is still king and not everybody is on Facebook, that challenge only applies to a certain sub-set of users, especially college students. By refreshing its look and by adding more social networking features as well as photo sharing, however, Evite is doing quite a good job at staying fresh, even though the company has been around for ten years now. The question for Evite is going to be if its users are going to accept these changes, which are pretty far reaching and include not just the new features, but also an updated user interface and the ability to import photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube.

JS-Kit is clearly on a roll right now. After acquiring the commenting system provider HaloScan just a few weeks ago, this partnership with Evite gives JS-Kit access to a very large number of users. JS-Kit is currently deployed on more than half a million sites.

Chirrup is a really simple Twitter comments solution. If you're familiar with the FriendFeed plugin for WordPress, Chirrup won't be a problem at all. It's essentially a separate component to add to your blog, similar to a widget. The system "Chirrup fetches all of the replies from Twitter, and sorts them by URL so you can have a comment feed for each page in your site." You can place the comment box anywhere you'd like and style it to your tastes. Users can even send a Twitter comment through system.

How It Works

To run Chirrup you will need the following:

• A little space with a hosting provider who support PHP (i.e. nearly any hosting provider).
• N.B. Your host must support curl, which means completely vanilla PHP installations may not work. Any hosting provider worth it's salt will have this enabled by default, however.
• The ability to add a piece of Javascript to your site's HTML templates.

It seems it doesn't need anything that hosting doesn't already come with. Though Chirrup store comments as they arrive from Twitter, it also uses a small XML file on your server to prevent relying on the database.

"1. Follow your web host's instructions for uploading files, and put Chirrup wherever you want it to go. Chirrup will run either from a dedicated subdomain or from a sub-folder within an existing site. Note down the URL where Chirrup's folder will be accessible - we'll use http://chirrup.example.com/ in this example.

2. If you are using Apache, Chirrup already contains a .htaccess file which will forbid visitors from peeking at Chirrup's XML cache. If you're using a web server other than Apache, you'll need to configure this yourself."

With some small lines of javascript placed where ever you'd prefer, you're all set to use Chirrup. To use Chirrup on a WordPress blog simply download the contents of Chirrup and upload them to your WordPress plugins directory in their own folder. Piece of cake.

A Solution to Conversation Fragmentation

The system is very simple and easy and also a great solution to the conversation fragmentation nature of services like Twitter. So if you've been pretty heated about not getting those comments back on your blog, Chirrup is the best solution out there to bring Twitter replies back to the originating source.

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan began developing Tejit in 2007 as a personal project when he became frustrated reading duplicate content from the 1000+ blogs he had bookmarked. Since then, Tejit has expanded its analysis capabilities across millions of blogs. Tejit's semantic-analysis engine uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic matching technology to identify topics, sentiments and entities present in web content.

A Flawed Tradition

According to SezWho CEO, Jitendra Gupta,

The traditional method of content discovery based on the similarity of content is not adequate for connecting conversation across social sites in a meaningful way. A new level of context-sensitive, semantic discovery is required to reflect all the layers of users' participation across the social web, and to track their contributions in a way that is universally relevant both within and across communities.

There's no doubt that the traditional rating system for comments has its flaws. In a post titled "Disqus Clout: Fail!", Phil Glockner of Scribkin points out one of the biggest flaws of comment rating systems using Disqus as an example. In the comments section, Louis Gray sums up the problem nicely:

I would expect it rewards those who comment most frequently, and wouldn't be so much a subjective view.

More Than Just A Rating System

Instead of replacing your comment system, SezWho aims to augment the conversations. Keeping the aforementioned flaw in mind, SezWho considers two important factors that: distributed conversations and the people behind them. SezWho provides a meta network information around participants and context. The context has information from various platforms to allow data and content to reside within the community. The service captures valuable information about the history and expertise of individual contributors. Community ratings are only a portion of the cumulative rankings for an overall score.

SezWho provided us with a comparison chart to better demonstrate the differences between what SezWho offers versus competitors Disqus and Intense Debate, which we've previously reviewed.

Adding Noise or Resolving Issues?

With all that SezWho adds, it can be argued that some of it will amount to more noise for users. While, we've previously used SezWho here on ReadWriteWeb to enhance our community, some of our writers are using the less complicated Disqus platform on their personal blogs. We wonder if the amount of blog coverage has also affected SezWho's userbase compared to Disqus, which has seen tremendous coverage since its launch.

With SezWho, other important issues are being tackled beyond their enhanced reputation system such as keeping track of conversations over a plethora of platforms and enabling a more sophisticated way to discover relevant content. SezWho aims to enhance communities rather than replace them,but can they filter the noise that's add everyday?