Installing Echo is just as easy as installing the plugins of its competitors like Intense Debate or Disqus - which is dealing with a major spam problem these days. JS-Kit provides plugins for WordPress and Blogger, as well as a code-snippet for other blogging platforms.

The Best Things in Life Aren't Free

It's important to point out, though, that the most interesting features, including real-time updates and comment aggregation from third-party sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are not available in the free version of Echo. The free version includes most of the core features of Echo, including the ability to share comments on Twitter and Facebook, nested replies, moderation tools, and customization.

For $98 a year, paying users will get access to Echo's aggregation features and real-time updates. JS-Kit also offers a white-label solution with priority support, as well as OEM integration.

It's good to see some development in the blog commenting market again. After a flurry of announcement and product releases last year, development and new product releases markedly slowed down this year, even though the growth of Twitter and Facebook only intensified the problem of comment fragmentation.

Improvements in geolocation, bandwidth, mobile devices and APIs are the foundation of this feeling that a useful Augmented Reality may be more realistic today than ever before.

Place Data

The most common dreams for AR are probably concerning historical and other data about locations. Dutch software firm SPRXmobile will soon release an Android mobile app called Layar that will display real estate and restaurant information on top of the view through your phone's camera as you pan around a city. That's an exciting platform and one that many people are hoping will go global and be available on other phones soon.

We would love to be able stand at an intersection and learn about the past and present owners of the buildings around us and about news events that have occurred within sight (Outside.in's iPhone app does this, but has performance issues and is limited in scope). ReadWriteWeb writer Sarah Perez says she'd like to visit the location of a historic military battle and view a re-enactment of the battle on some device, not just read a posted placard about the place's history. Nokia's Ian Kennedy told us he fantasizes about being able to look at a building and stream crowd-sourced audio commentary on the history of the place.

How about an iPhone app that pulls from census and Data.gov APIs - say the neighborhood you're thinking of renting a house in made most of its political donations to the Republican Party and has had 3 major fines assessed for toxic spills in the last year.

Greg Smith points to Yanko Design's theoretical Third Eye, an electronic monocle that can be turned between "tourist" and "consumer" filters for information placed on top of the places it is pointed at.

How did this man make friends in the first place?

Above: Tonchidot's mysterious product hasn't been heard from again since appearing at the TechCrunch 50 conference and some suspect it was never real. Reports of a large established Japanese mobile company developing the same kind of application surfaced just this afternoon on Asiajin, one of the leading English-language tech blogs about Japan.

Find My Keys or Car

How about an app that lets you capture and remember the location of your keys, car, or anything else you might have trouble finding later? Konstantin Gonikman says he'd like a whole Augmented Reality catalog of everything in his house for easy retrieval.

Shopping!

Face Recognition and People Search

Several people we talked to wanted some kind of people info made available for situations like seeing someone but not remembering who they are! Why limit it to people you already know, though? Those tiny conference name tags could be a thing of the past. How about being able to bring up all a persons' public social media profile links just by looking at them through your mobile phone's camera? That would be great.

The person next to you...is a zombie.

Control-F For Offline Print

If you work online a lot, you may have already found yourself subconsciously trying to hit "control-F" when reading the newspaper to try and find words on the page. It can be frustrating to have to rely on antiquated if charming technologies like the index in a book. I would gladly pay a small extra fee for every book I buy in order to have access to full text search of that book on my phone.

We don't know what exactly is going on here, but it looks cool.

What About You?

What layers of information or user experiences would you like to see come out of the Augmented Reality world? Just watch out you don't ask for what Sean Canton said he wanted out of AR today: "I'd like some rose colored glasses that make everything seem ok."

Awesome Geordi La Forge spray painted stencil at the top: "Chief Engineer" CC from Flickr user striatic.

According to an e-mail from Digg tonight, it will likely happen Thursday. "We've elected to remove shouts in favor of more popular sharing options, based on user feedback and broader market research," a Digg spokesperson told us. The new share feature will also include an e-mail option.

While Digg has yet to activate the new share feature, Muhammad Saleem, social media strategist and an active community member on Digg, tonight told ReadWriteWeb he can understand why Digg would want to remove the shout feature. "It's become a way of spamming stories to hundreds of people to amass votes and promote junk," he explained, "so I am definitely in favor of the removal as long as a new, better feature takes its place."

Unfortunately, he doesn't think that a Twitter-share or Facebook-share option would be a better alternative - or even a good replacement for shouts.

The Problem with Shouts

Saleem explained that Digg instituted shouts as a way for people to share stories with each other, assuming (or hoping) that people would share a story or two now and again with 10-12 of their close friends "like Kevin would send stuff to the Digg team, I would shout something to The Drill Down team, etc."

The problem, of course, was that the feature opened the door to a huge spam fest. People started amassing friends by the hundreds, and then shouting their stories to them in an effort to get the Diggs necessary to get to the front page. Most Diggers would tell you that once Digg realized how the system was being abused, they started limiting the feature, or minimizing the impact of the feature by requiring more Diggs (diversity) for stories that were getting votes as a result of shouts.

"Now," according to Saleem, "they need a better mechanism that still enables people to share things without being penalized, and at the same time they need a system that doesn't get abused."

Because the system can still be abused.

According to Reg Saddler, a.k.a Zaibatsu, power users don't use shout. "Shout is superfluous on Digg. You use it to help out others, but you don't really need it to get the word out about your stories."

Saddler, once a power user on Digg, is now making a name for himself on Twitter. According to Twitalyzer, Saddler's 'clout' value stands at 100%. "On Twitter, I can send a tweet out every single hour to my 83K followers and drive traffic to Digg," Saddler pointed out, "If you are a power user and you have a fan base on Twitter, you don't need the shout feature on Digg."

This is not to say he spams his audience with worthless content; quite the opposite, Saddler has a keen eye for breaking news and is happy to share interesting stories with his online friends; Twitter just allows him to do it in real time.

So what's the answer?

Whether Digg offers its users shouts, Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail, they'll likely be faced with many of the same issues.

According to Saleem, the only option that could work is for Digg to come up with more ground rules, but even that is a tall order. "They are leaders in the space, meaning they face issues many others don't face because they're not at the same level; the solutions they need are to problems that haven't existed before for other companies."

So what do you think? Good move on Digg's part or do you have a better solution in mind? We'd love your thoughts.

Disclaimer: The author of this post co-hosts The Drill Down with Reg Saddler and Muhammad Saleem.

Currently both apps are available for free (with ads), but Thomson Reuters is looking into a subscription model as well, though according to PaidContent, it will be a few months before we will hear more details about this.

iPhone App Needs Polish

We have seen a number of impressive news applications for the iPhone from prominent players like the New York Times (our review), Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the BBC, and Bloomberg. Sadly, the Reuters app turned out to be one of the weakest applications in this group.

Let's start with the good news. While a lot of the other apps tend to take a long time to start up and update their news feeds (though the Bloomberg app also starts up and updates quite quickly), the Thomson Reuters app is ready to go within seconds.

Unlike all of its competitors, though, the Reuters app starts up with the Top News feed by default, and presents the rest of the news categories in a long list, without the ability to customize the order of these categories. If you want the app to show you the latest 'Internet News' when you start the program, for example, you are out of luck, as you have to flick past the stories in the 'Top News' section first.

All the other apps also allow users to set shortcuts to their favorite sections, while the shortcut menu in the Reuters app is static (News, Pictures, Video, Markets, and Stocks).

In terms of presentation, the image section is nicely done, but the videos look blocky (even with a fast connection) and the Bloomberg app does a way better job at showing information about the stock market.

Verdict

The app has a lot of potential, especially thanks to the excellent and timely content that Reuters is able to offer. Sadly, the iPhone app currently falls short and doesn't quite deliver the experience to complement the quality of the available content. It should be relatively easy to rectify some of these problems, though, and we hope the see a new and better version of the app soon.

After a document has been uploaded, users can easily set different security settings, and decide if a document will be available for printing or download. Backboard allows its users to decide if they want a document to be available only to invited reviewers, or if the documents Backboard page should be secured with a password. The document can also just be hidden behind a 'secret' URL.

Where Backboard stands out, though, is in how easy the application makes it to leave feedback. Reviewers can simply use a virtual pen to mark a document up in Backboard's excellent document viewer, or, in a text document, they can highlight parts of the text, and a form for leaving comments will automatically pop up (this feature feels a bit similar to Word 2007). Thanks to this stripped-down but powerful user interface, even an inexperienced user should be able to open a document and start reviewing it within minutes.

Comments appear in real-time in a sidebar on the right. To enable these real-time comments, Backboard has partnered with Orbited.

Another feature that makes Backboard stand out is its close integration with Microsoft Office 2007 and Apple's iWork productivity apps. After installing the respective plugins, Backboard users can easily upload documents to the service from within their productivity apps.

Pricing Plans

Backboard features an interesting pricing model. Unlike some of its competitors, all pricing tiers feature unlimited document storage, but the tiers are differentiated by the maximum file size of these documents, number of users on the account, and security features. The free version, for example, is limited to documents smaller than 5 MB (which should still be enough for all but the most complex documents) and doesn't feature a secure SSL connection. Users who use the free account also won't be able to restrict access to a document to specific users. Paid plans start at $6 a month for one user and $25 for teams of up to five members.

Backboard also features a special 'proofing' plan for freelancers who do client-facing work, which allows users to add their own branding and a custom URL. This plan starts at $10 for one user.

Feedback Made Easy

We have seen a lot of interesting collaborative feedback products that are quite similar to Backboard, but a lot of them are geared more towards freelancers. Backboard is definitely a great tool for this group of users as well, but at the same time, it is also geared towards groups in the enterprise. In many ways, it is this degree of flexibility that makes this tool so powerful. While the company isn't necessarily marketing its tool this way, Backboard could also be a great tool for giving feedback in a school or college setting, where students often write multiple drafts and teachers spend a lot of their time marking up papers.

Thanks to its focus on security, Backboard will surely be attractive to security-conscious businesses as well, and the company will also happily work with its enterprise customers to implement solutions that comply with HIPPA and other industry-specific regulations.

Overall, Backboard turned out to be one of the most flexible and easy to use tools of its kind, and if you are looking for a better solution for gathering feedback and getting approval for documents, it is most definitely worth a try.

First head over to the site and register for an account. Registration is quick and easy so you'll be ready to start in no time. Anothr gives you three ways to receive instant updates:

• MSN Messenger
• Sype
• Google Talk

You can also set up Anothr to get subscriptions via email.

. After selecting your client you'll be asked to add the iNeZha robot to your contacts. If successfully added, you should receive a message from the bot soon after. If a problem occurs or you wish to change clients, there's a "delete and start over" button to restart the process. The bot will first give you a host of information such as news updates about iNeZha and keyword commands for navigation purposes.

Adding Feed Alerts

To get started, either type in a site URL or just send a keyword to the iNeZha bot and you'll be given a list of feed results that match and a link to the feed profile. For example, if you type in "ReadWriteWeb", a list of feeds pertaining to ReadWriteWeb would be instantly sent back to you with a link to the profile of each result. Each profile allows you to view the latest updates, the number of users sharing a feed, related feeds, tags, and a host of other information.

Once you've found your feed you can easily add it from the site or from the bot with a keyboard command.

Alert Functionality

Your alerts should instantly start rolling in through your IM client. From here there are a variety of things you can do. There are plenty of simple and easy to remember keyboard commands that you can instantly access by typing in '?' or 'menu'. Using the provided keyboard commands, you can share any of the items to Twitter, bookmark it via Del.icio.us, or share it with your friends on Anothr. Reading a feed from any of your alerts is a simple as typing in 'Read: [id number]. ID numbers are provided with every feed you subscribe to and also for every item in a feed. You can also go back and search through your list of feeds for certain keywords and the iNeZha bot will return results only from the feed items that match your query.

Bundling Your Feeds

You can invite friends to subscribe to your personal bundle of feeds. Just enter in your username for the provided services such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Digg, Last.fm, Youtube and more. When pairing your Twitter account with Anothr, you can automatically share your subscriptions, IM moods, and bookmarked articles to Twitter without the need to type in a keyboard command to the bot. Head to your profile to track who's subscribing to your bundle and more.

Get Your News Instantly

Ironically, Anothr isn't just "another" real-time tracker. There's a host of features to explore, many ways to stay up to date, and share your findings with friends. While we wouldn't say it will replace feed readers such as Google Reader or FeedDemon, it sure beats waiting for those services to update you with the latest. For the news that just can't wait, Anothr is a great service to get it instantly.

Why Real-Time is Inevitable

Capitalism is about opportunities. Whenever there is a gap, there is an opportunity to bridge it. The classic newspaper business worked like this. People gathered news throughout the day and then once every 24 hours, committed what they had gathered to paper. That was good enough for a long time, but with the emergence of radio and television, and later of blogs and RSS, once per day seems like a joke. Clearly, we demand news more often than once per day. News bloggers in politics, world news, and particularly technology, recognized that the old way of delivering news had a flaw - it was not real-time. They turned the flaw into an opportunity.

Of course, this is not specific to blogging. During the first days of the war with Iraq we saw reporters embedded with the troops. Ridiculous? Perhaps. But it was also quite entertaining, because it was the news in real-time. The competition between the news channels guarantees the rise of real-time reporting. In the endless quest to out-do their competitors, stations have eventually arrived at real-time TV.

And news was not even the first industry to push for real-time. First, there was Wall Street. When I joined Goldman Sachs almost 15 years ago, there was already talk about the real-time clearance of trades. I confess that I am not sure if we are there yet today, but we must be really close. The competetive pressure on Wall Street, unlike any other, drives everything to be faster and faster. The drive for faster is what keeps the brokers and Wall Street technologists up at night.

Why News Blogging is Stressful

News blogging is probably one of the most stressful occupations you can have. First, you have to watch the crazy-fast moving, non-stop tech world all the time. News bloggers have thousands of feeds in their RSS readers. Staying on top of all that is not easy. In addition, you have to write well. It is not just the story, its how you present it that makes a difference. Creativity needs to be present whether you are sick or its rainy or you are simply not in the mood. Every day you need to watch the world and re-invent yourself.

In a way, news blogging is like a mom and pop grocery store in that everyday you have to get up and service people no matter what. The difference, of course, is that blogging is highly intellectual and the pressure to deliver unique and brilliant news creates much more stress than one would have running a grocery store. Mike Arrington is quoted in the New York Times article saying that this kind of pressure is not sustainable. Of course it is not. No human being can process information in real-time indefinitely. We get sick and tired of it.

However, to attribute Marc's death or Om's heart attack to blogging is probably far-fetched. And to speculate that because of these two examples the entire news blogging sector is endangered is far-fetched as well. Tech news bloggers are passionate and energetic and they love what they are doing. Love and passion help them stay on top of the rapidly moving river of news. And also, as with any endeavor, humans adapt. Mike and Om aren't alone anymore. They now have awesome teams of people who help them, just like we have a team of people doing news here at ReadWriteWeb.

Why Twitter is Not an Accident

Yet, real-time is not something that is about to go away. Perhaps one of the most vivid examples of how real-time is creeping into our culture is Twitter. Even a few years ago, the concept of constantly telling others about what you are up to would be considered absurd. Yet today, we not only embrace it, we are in love with the idea. Chat and email no longer reflect our constant hunger for 'what is going on now?' Listening to radio is boring because it is not personalized. Neither is TV. But Twitter gives us exactly the kind of real-time news we love - personalized and short.

Lets face it, we are obsessed with real-time. We want more, and faster. It is not enough for me to have you tell me what you did yesterday. I want to know what you did 5 minutes ago. It is not enough for us to know that yesterday Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo! This is the kind of news we need to know as soon as it happens. We have entered an age in media where as soon as the news is created it needs to be channeled and broadcast to everyone. Real-time is not an accident. It is a direct consequence of our hunger to improve. Of course, we may be biting off more than we can chew.

Why Future Holds More Stress

The bad news is that real-time is not going away. We are not going to settle for less than right now. This means that the future holds more and more stress. As we evolve into a society that demands more information and more information processing immediately, we are also evolving into a society of people under constant stress. The fact that computers are ubiquitous is making it all that much worse. Of course people were stressed last century as well, but in the seventies when you went home for the weekend you, relaxed. Nowadays? No way. There is no 30 minute period in my life that I do not check email. Going off the grid is really hard for many of us. Real-time is not only stressful, it is addictive.

Faster causes stress. So does the non-stop flow of information. When we are unable to fall asleep at night, we lie down stressed and thinking why? Why am I doing all of this? The tough part is that there is no other way. We do not know how to do what we do and not be stressed. So for better or worse, we are rushing forward through the sea of information towards more stress.

Conclusion

Back in 2000, a wonderful science writer James Gleick, wrote a book called Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. The topics that we touch on in this post are discussed much more deeply and much more eloquently in Gleick's book. The age of Faster is upon us and it is not just blogging that's under the gun. All of us, our life style, and our families are rapidly changing under the pressure and stress of real-time. Where is it all headed? Only time will tell. One thing is for sure - we need to be careful and mindful.

Please let us know your thoughts on the emerging faster culture, on the concept of real-time, and how it is creating stress in your life.