While it's true MySpace's commitment to member customization allowed the community's lowest common denominators to bring down the look of the site, Facebook's aesthetic has also suffered with 3rd party app integration. This is hardly a reason for such a mass migration. And because MySpace and Facebook both offer Blackberry and iPhone applications, it's also unlikely that mobile access played a huge part in MySpace's demise as market leader.

Dougherty's assessment about Facebook Connect is likely the key reason for such dramatic traffic growth given her enclosed time line. As high traffic services like Disqus, Digg and WordPress began using Facebook Connect, members found cross-platform distribution with ease-of-use. Facebook moved from being a College forum site to a full scale lifestyle platform. Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system.

In early June Inside Facebook reported that Americans spent 13.9 billion minutes per year on Facebook and 5 billion minutes on MySpace. When you remember that Facebook doesn't allow for time-consuming html-based profile customizations, you realize the feat they've accomplished. Rather than depending solely on its employees, Facebook's success relies on the fact that it increases its value through its 15,000 Facebook Connect members and more than 50,000 app developers.

SHARED TRAVEL PLANNING: Both Tripit and Dopplr are fantastic tools for keeping track of itineraries and sharing travel plans with friends. Meanwhile Gliider is a great tool for saving large blocks of trip-related text and syncing them to offline folders.

gliider from jared richardson on Vimeo.

DIRECTIONS: TeleNav provides GPS services for a number of mobile devices including the iPhone. The tool offers voice driving directions, spoken address recognition, rerouting for accidents and traffic jams, and locates wireless hotspots, the lowest gas prices, parking lots and ATMs. TomTom for iPhone is also expected to be a great tool as the docking station doubles as a charger.

FOOD: Many of us are familiar finding food with the Yelp and Urbanspoon iPhone apps; however, if you want an authentic road trip experience you might want to consult Roadfood. This site lays claim to the "most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." We get heart palpitations just looking at the heaping plates of pulled pork, burgers and ribs. Meanwhile, if you're looking to picnic with something more healthy and sustainable, Local Harvest's farmer's market finder coupled with the Locavore iPhone app offer users the chance to find local in-season produce. Locallectual offers a similar tool with their iLocavore app.

VIDEOS & PHOTOS: One way to get images up quickly is to stream them directly from your camera. Eye-Fi uses a wireless connection to upload photos and videos directly to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa accounts. If you want to live stream sans touch ups or editing, Eye-Fi is an extremely useful cordless solution. Other mobile streaming video and image options include Qik, Flixwagon, Stickam, Justin.tv and Kyte Producer.

GEO-TAGGING: AroundShare is a mobile application that allows users to publish photos to Google Maps. Meanwhile, Flickr's users can also organize their videos and photos on a map via the site's geo-tagging features. As for geo-based discovery, Flickr mobile utilizes the locational features of the Android and iPhone and allows members to explore public photos from nearby sites.

TRACKING:Google Latitude lets users share their location on a map in real time from their phones or computers. Maps can be embedded in public websites and road trippers appear as moving dots on the map. Imagine your best friend surprising you with Thai food just as you pull up to your hotel. Services like Brightkite and Loopt also broadcast your location; however, these services are based on push notifications rather than real time tracking.

TELLING THE STORY: The Whuffaoke group is using Dipity to aggregate their media. The service allows users to upload their Tweets, blog posts and photo sets to a map, time line and flip book interface. The nice thing about this tool is that it can either be embedded (as seen here) or shared via Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg. Other tools to aggregate road trip-related media include JS-Kit's Echo, Disqus or an embedded hashtag feed.

Competition

The market for commenting services has become quite competitive lately. Yahoo, for example, just announced an alliance with JS-Kit yesterday, and Facebook also just released a commenting plugin based on Facebook Connect as its first social widget. Other competitors of IntenseDebate are obviously Disqus, which already offers integration with Seesmic, and Google's Friend Connect. None of these, however, offer the extensibility that IntenseDebate's new plugins now offer.

Adding these plugins looks like a smart move on IntenseDebate's part. Not only can it now tap into a pool of talented coders (and possibly hire the best ones in the long run), but - once more plugins become available -  it will also be able to offer its users new features that none of its competitors offer. At the same time, this also allows the IntenseDebate team to focus on its own core product and the stability and speed of its service.

What Would You Add?

If you could write a plugin to extend your favorite commenting platform, which features would you add?

Google, of course, already offers a similar service with Google Friend Connect, though this offers far more features than just the ability to leave comments. Google also allows users to sign in with an OpenID account, as well as with accounts from other vendors, including Yahoo and AOL. In the announcement, Facebook stresses that this is just the first of a number of social widgets based on Facebook Connect that the company is planning to release in the near future.

It is important to note that other commenting services like JS-Kit already allow users to use their Facebook Connect logins - something that Facebook actually acknowledges in its announcement.

Features

Publishers will be able to customize the widget and moderate comments, though it is not clear what this moderation will look like. Users without a Facebook Connect ID will also be able to leave comments, but we will have to wait and see how well Facebook's widget will be able handle the inevitable spam that will come with this.

One nice feature of the Facebook Connect widget is that your comments are not only posted to your Facebook profile, but that additional comments that your friends make on Facebook in reference to your comment will also appear on the originating site. This, as Nick O'Neill points out, is similar to what a number of blog plugins like IntenseDebate are doing with comments left on Friendfeed right now. For publishers, this also means that their content is going to get a wider exposure on Facebook.

However, while being able to use the Facebook Connect ID to sign into a comments system is nice, most publishers are probably looking for a system that can handle a wider range of sign-on credentials. Facebook is now a member of the OpenID Foundation, but the widget only supports Facebook Connect IDs.

Breaking out of the Silo

What is most important about this announcement, though, is that Facebook continues to open up its platform to third parties. Earlier this month, third-party developers got access to users' status updates, notes, and links. Now, Facebook is allowing bloggers and publishers to implement some of Facebook's core features outside of Facebook's own site. Facebook use to be a closed off silo, but this is changing rapidly right now and it will be interesting to see how Facebook's users will react to this.

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.

Installation

Artiklz currently directly supports Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and self-hosted WordpRess blogs, though you could theoretically install it on any web site. To install it, all you have to do is to sign up and put a short snippet of code into your site's html code.

If you want to see what comments Artiklz would aggregate for your own blog, you can try this very straightforward demo here (you might have to reload the page before you see your comments).

The basic layout of the Artiklz blog widget is very plain, but you can add your own custom CSS to make it fit in better with the design of your blog.

Tracking and Notification

Another nice feature is Artiklz' ability to notify you by email, SMS, or instant messenger (only Google Talk and Jabber are currently available) once a new comment is made about your post on any given service.

You can also add a badge to your blog that gives your readers the option to be notified when you post a new article, or when somebody leaves a comment on a given post. You can also track a specific person's comments across the web.

FriendFeed

One feature we really liked about the Artiklz FriendFeed integration is its ability to bring in comments from across FriendFeed, while other plugins often only aggregate comments from the first post on FriendFeed, but ignore those from links shared later on.

Competition

We like the fact that Artiklz tries to appeal to both bloggers and readers, and that it supports a very wide range of services. It does not directly compete with JS-Kit, SezWho, or Disqus, as it neither provides any reputation management functions, nor its own commenting or comment management features. Instead, it is squarely focused on aggregating comments.

Verdict

In our tests, Artiklz performed just as advertised and if you are a blogger and concerned about comment fragmentation, we recommend you give it a try.

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.