Last July, we covered the initial debut of JS-Kit’s Echo, a real-time commenting system.This morning during a media conference call, the CEO Khris Loux announced that in light of the success of the product (and likely because many people haven’t liked the JS-Kit name for years), they are rebranding the entire company as Echo.
During the call the company also detailed the first batch of customers it has signed up for the product. These include CBS/CNet, Discovery Channel, Dow Jones Local Media Group, Hearst Digital News, The Press Enterprise, CanWest, Technorati, and KQED. Loux says that while Echo has several hundred thousand sites on the platform, as much as 99% of the traffic comes from its top dozen partners, which drive between 10-20 million uniques a month. → Read More
TweetMeme, the quickly-growing site that lists the most popular links on Twitter, is launching an overhauled version today that the startup is calling TweetMeme V2. The company says that today’s release includes “a total rewrite” of its scoring system, which will likely affect how quickly and what type of stories appear on the site.
Given that the site isn’t live yet we can’t test the new engine, but TweetMeme says that the new ranking engine will provide “more varied and better quality content”, which will be helped in part by a new kudos scoring system that can change the weight of individual Twitter users. The site is also introducing an improved filtering engine, a new comment system (you’ll now be able to take a comment on the site and retweet it), and a flagging system that lets users bury bad entries. A more robust analytics package will also be appearing next week. → Read More
“We’re here today to announce the death of comments.”
That’s what JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux said in his opening remarks at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp earlier this month. He went on to unveil ECHO, JS-Kit’s new take on how conversations should be happening around content on the web. And today, we’re going to try a limited test of this new system on the TechCrunch Network.
To reiterate, this is just a test that will reside under only this post for the time-being, so let us know what you think.
While at first glance, the comments you see below this post may look like a slight variation of any other commenting system, the reality is much different. Sure, a part of ECHO is made up by what we think of as traditional comments, that is, comments you fill out on a particular article and post to it. But the majority of the content in this commenting area will actually be populated from sources all around the web talking about this piece of content. → Read More
Comments are taking on a life of their own now as Facebook Connect and other modes of commenting communication become increasingly popular. Comments are evolving into what some say are “social gestures,” instead of conventional comments and these gestures are taking place all over the web, not just on a publisher’s site. Just look at the amount of reTweets a popular TechCrunch article gets on Twitter-it can reach into the thousands. JS-Kit, a company that offers an array of Javascript-based commenting, polling, and ratings widgets, is launching a new commenting product at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp that is designed to change the way users comment and the way publishers interact with comments. Echo, JS-Kit’s real-time streaming commenting widget, aggregates any Tweets, Diggs, or FriendFeed updates that a commenter is making about a webpage and pulls it into the stream. Here’s the live stream feed of the event.
I had the opportunity to demo the widget and it’s pretty cool. Echo’s technology will crawls social networks and sites including Twitter, for the url links to an article or post on a site (it even is able to discover shortened urls) and then reassembles the comments from the web into the widget’s real-time stream. → Read More
JS-Kit, a company that offers an array of Javascript-based commenting, polling, and ratings widgets, is acquiring the assets of SezWho, a competing enhanced comment system. JS-Kit will continue to keep SezWho’s service running for the next 30 days, during which users will be offered a choice of moving over to JS-Kit or choosing an alternative system.
SezWho offered a universal reputation system for comments, allowing visitors to log in using their Email address or OpenID, establishing a reputation system that carries across onto other SezWho-enabled sites. And unlike some other comment systems, blog owners didn’t have to worry about handing over their data to SezWho – for quite a while one of the primary criticisms of some competing services, like Disqus, was that they housed the blog’s comment data, effectively keeping their owners hostage (this is no longer an issue, as these services now offer synced comment archives).
JS-Kit’s acquisition of SezWho is not particularly surprising. There’s definitely a need for enhanced commenting systems, but this space is overdue for consolidation. The problem with having all of these discrete commenting systems is that for the most part, they aren’t compatible with each other. Users’ comment histories and reputations are segmented across a handful of competing services, which sort of defeats the point. → Read More
Cross-platform feedback widgets maker JS-Kit just added a feature that enables users to enhance comments with pictures, on any of the 600,000+ websites using its custom commenting system. I’ve always been curious to know why major blogging platforms don’t simply add such a functionality to their commenting systems, while there are already companies like Seesmic, Viddler and Blipback focussing on taking a step further by adding video commenting features to websites.
There are custom picture commenting plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type available, but we should note JS-Kit is not only meant for blogs, as it can be installed on any Javascript-enabled website. According to the blog post announcing the new features, JS-Kit users can now attach multiple images to each of their comments on sites running its commenting systems. Images will be auto-thumbnailed and can be clicked on for full-size viewing. → Read More
There are way too many comment login systems out there. Each blogging platform (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger) has its own login system, then there are the cross-platform commenting systems like Disqus and JS-KIT. But many of these will soon give way to Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect.
I am talking about just the ID people use to login, not the commenting systems themselves. We adopted Facebook Connect as a login option for anyone who wants to leave a comment on TechCrunch, and it already accounts for more than 20 percent of our comments. FB Connect is also now available to any of the 500,000 blogs and sites that use the JS-Kit commenting widget, and Disqus is planning on implementing Facebook Connect before the end of the year. → Read More
We’re still looking to confirm, but alarm:clock says they’ve learned that web widget provider JS-Kit has agreed to acquire conversation tracking service coComment.
JS-Kit raised a total of $4.8 million in two rounds, the Series B for $3.6 million dating back less than a month. coComment was also venture-backed: it had raised a total of $1.5 million from Netage Capital Partners nearly two years ago. → Read More
Widget developer JS-Kit has joined with AOL’s Userplane in a widget cross-distribution partnership that should significantly increase the potential userbases for both companies.
Both companies produce popular sets of widgets that can be easily implemented with a minimal amount of code. Among Userplane’s offerings are a popular Webchat widget (which allows for full featured online chat), a media player, and an embeddable bulletin board. JS-Kit offers less media-centric widgets like Ratings, Comments, and Polls.
With the new partnership, these two companies will begin offering eachother’s widgets in the hopes of gaining further distribution. At first, Userplane will be offering the JS-Kit Ratings widget and JS-Kit will be offering the Userplane Webchat widget, with both companies splitting embedded advertising 50/50. In the future there are plans to include more of each company’s widgets in the deal. → Read More
JS-Kit, a startup that develops a series of widgets that can be quickly integrated into websites, has raised $3.6 million in a Series B funding round led by Altos Ventures, with existing investor TEF3 also participating. The company says that it will use the funding to expand its team of engineers, along with the addition of DataPortability’s Chris Saad as Strategic Advisor.
JS-Kit’s repertoire of available widgets include a commenting system, ratings, and polls, all of which can be embedded on a webpage with short snippet of code. Earlier this year the company scrored a deal with WorldNow, a CMS provider for local news station affiliates. Over the summer JS-Kit acquired HaloScan, a competing commenting system, to improve its global profiles and better integrate with blog platforms. → Read More
JS-Kit, a provider of Javascript comments, ratings, and poll widgets for blogs, has announced their acquisition of HaloScan, one of the largest hosted comments service providers. This announcement is also coordinated with the launch of several major features. Financial terms were not disclosed. HaloScan had previously partnered with JS-Kit in January to provide the users of their comment system with “one-click” deployment of JS-Kit’s ratings widget (providing ratings for articles, not ratings for comments). This acquisition will result in an exponential increase of JS-Kit’s customer base, providing new access to over 520,000 participating sites, bringing its total reach to about 550,000 sites. JS-Kit also claims that with this new acquisition, it will be registering 300+ new sites per day. HaloScan’s comment systems will integrate with JS-Kit’s Ratings, Polls, Reviews, Navigator, and Advisor widgets. JS-Kit’s comments also comes with full Akismet spam protection and profanity filters. Blogger’s original comment system only allowed for comments from other Blogger users, so HaloScan gained popularity early on as an alternative to their innate system. Blogger also recommended it as the system to use for providing Trackback links. It’s seen a drop in usage recently because of temperamental server issues (possibly related to the transition), so hopefully JS-Kit can solve these issues when the transition is complete in 30 days or so. JS-Kit will leverage its newly acquired users to launch important new features. One of which is the implementation of an open standards-based, portable, user profile. Users will have access to all of the comments made on any JS-Kit participating site through an OpenID login system (pictured below). The portable profile is accessible through a pop-up on the hosting site. This does lend itself to easier discovery, which could possibly help with adoption for new publishers. → Read More
WorldNow, a leading CMS provider for local television news sites that total over 19 million visitors monthly, has partnered with JS-Kit to provide them with a number of community based widgets that will be embedded across their sites. JS-Kit, founded in 2006, creates simple widgets that can be implemented with only a few lines of code (you can see our introductory review of them here). Besides JS-Kit’s flagship commenting widget, WorldNow will be adding Ratings, Score, Reviews, Navigator, and Polls to their sites. WorldNow has 320 television customers, including a number of ABC and NBC affiliates (example). Advertising revenues from the JS-Kit widgets will be split 50/50 between the two companies. JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux sees the partnership as a huge step for the company, which will be significantly increasing its reach. While he concedes that many of WorldNow’s 19 million readers probably won’t use the commenting system (at least at first), he says there will still be very sizable growth in the company’s user base. This may be the case, but it’s hard to gauge just how much they stand to gain from WorldNow’s expansive readership – few people are used to the idea of participating in a community on a news site. Loux also believes that with the charging atmosphere of the economy, companies will be more likely to turn to companies like JS-Kit for commenting systems rather than build their own in-house. JS-Kit is obviously maturing as a company, having grown from a basic commenting system to a full-featured suite that includes APIs, security, and OpenID integration. In January the site also announced a partnership with HaloScan, which provides easily-deployable comment systems for 489,300 sites. These partnerships should put them in a good position to take on the other players in this space, which include Disqus, SezWho, and IntenseDebate. CrunchBase Information JS-Kit Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Khris Loux, the CEO of startup JS-Kit, thinks he’s finally come up with the killer widget. JS-Kit has all sorts of widgets used by blogs and other sites for ratings, reviews, polls, and comments. But the latest one he just launched is not just gee-whiz cute. It’s gee-whiz disruptive. It is called the JS-Kit Advisor. And it will bring ratings and reviews from trusted sources such as Experian and JD Power to businesses and product listings across the Web. The first data partner to go live is Experian, which is known for its consumer credit scores. But Experian also keeps financial and other background-check information on 22 million local businesses across the country. For instance, Experian powers ContractorCheck.com, its own Website where consumers can buy $10 background-check reports on local general contractors. But now Experian is taking some of that same key information and giving it away for free in JS-Kit’s widget. A local listings site could install the widget and then anytime someone looked up a contractor, the widget would pop up and show them if the contractor’s license is expired, how much they are bonded for, and whether they have any liens or judgments against them, as well as their credit and bankruptcy history. “In other words,” says Loux, “all of the information that a bank uses to judge you, the consumer—the consumer can now use to judge a business, prior to clicking through.” A green check means the contractor can be trusted, a red X means keep looking. The widget does not give the full details of a report, but enough for a consumer to know whether to steer clear of a certain contractor. Loux explains the concept: I want to make sure the guy is not a dirt bag. This will bring more data around the point of the transaction. If a guy has a green check mark, he can grab it and show it off. The guy with the red check will hide the fact that he is a dirt bag and try to do marketing and SEO stuff. Those who are winners will win more and those who are scumbags will die faster. It’s good marketing for Experian, and maybe it will end up selling the more in-depth reports to banks or those contractors with a red X next to their name who want to see how it got there. But isn’t all that → Read More
HaloScan, a company that provides easily deployable commenting systems for over 489,300 sites, has partnered with JavaScript module provider JS-Kit to provide its user base with “one-click” deployment of JS-Kit’s ratings widget. HaloScan users can now go into their regular commenting system control panel and check a box to show JS-Kit’s ratings widget alongside their comments. JS-Kit provides a number of widgets including its own commenting system, reviewed quite awhile ago, that will complement, not replace, the system offered by HaloScan. While the ratings widget now comes as an optional feature alongside HaloScan comments, it does not have anything to do with the rating of user comments (as is the case with several commenting systems like SezWho). Rather, users are supposed to click on JS-Kit’s 5-star ratings badge to rate the content of the page, which probably displays a news article given the typical HaloScan-enabled site (DailyNews of Los Angeles and The Olympian are a couple of the bigger ones). JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux is emboldened by this partnership because he believes that scale and prevalence are very important for startups that provide extra functionality for existing websites. He also expects a shakeout in 2008 among such service providers as those that fail to gain traction die off. We’ll just have to see how much room the market has for multiple providers of commenting, rating, review, and polling widgets (I imagine quite a lot). But if he is right, this could very well prove to be an important first distribution deal for his company to make. CrunchBase Information HaloScan JS-Kit Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Texty is a dead simple but useful new internet service that you can use to quickly create and edit content on a web page with zero HTML or programming skills. Go to the site, start typing text in a WYSIWYG editor, format it and add images. Click a button and get an embed code. Your text will appear in whatever website you add the code to. And if you want to make changes, go back to Texty and edit it. The changes will flow to whatever sites you’ve embedded it on. You can also add comment functionality to a piece of text, and create a RSS feed. There are lots of great and easy to use content management systems on the web already. Blogging software is just one example. But if someone is working on a web page outside of something like a blog and wants to add a bit of text and graphics, this is a good solution. See our coverage of JS-Kit which has similar tools. I was surprised at how many people are looking for something exactly like this. I’ve embedded a bit of text and an image below. Everything below this paragraph, including the image, is actually embedded from Texty. → Read More
Web widget provider JS-Kit has been doing a lot of growing up since starting as a simple commenting widget, founder Lev Walkin’s pet project in his off hours. Since then, that single widget has grown into a company with the addition of CEO Kris Loux, 12 engineers from Filmloop, and today’s $1.2 million round of financing led by the Entrepreneur’s Fund III. JS-Kit’s library of widgets make it dead simple to add interactivity to your site. They have widgets for commenting, rating, polls, top rated content, and a combination for rated comments. Each of the widgets is fully skinable by CSS and only require a couple lines of code to add. Each of the widgets use javascript and are linked to page elements by the URL of the page or a customized id property. Over 5,000 sites have added the widgets, adding 1,000 more each month. Combined, the sites generate over 70 million impressions each month. They’ve already got some ideas of how they want to monetize that traffic. One route is dropping advertisements into the widgets. Rather than putting ads in all the widgets, they’ve decided to only put ads in the “top rated content” widget. Publishers can either keep the ads and split the revenue 50/50, or pay about $40 a month/1 million pageviews your widget gets. The Chronicle of Higher Education is one client which has simply opted to pay. They originally added the widget to their site to save themselves unnecessary development time. We made a similar choice when adding their ratings widget to CrunchBase. Widgets as white labeled website features is a useful concept for publishers who don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Kickapps has done this somewhat with social networking. However, JS-Kit still has a bit to go in making their widgets viable for larger clients. As easy to use as JS-Kit’s widgets are, it’s a tough proposition to ask larger businesses to hand hosting and control of their user’s data to JS-Kit. Businesses that depend the most on these features (and would therefore pay the most) may choose to spend the time to develop the feature in house and hedge against any future risk from depending on a web service. → Read More
We first covered JS-Kit last November when we talked about their quick embed code that lets you add comments to any site where JavaScript is accepted. Since then, JS-Kit has been creating more widgets making adding user interaction to any site dead simple (2 lines of code per widget). JS-Kit has also grown from a one-man-show into a full company after adding 5 of the 12 engineers from Filmloop (which shut down earlier this year). Since then, they’ve been turning out a new widget every two weeks. JS-Kit is growing a suite of widgets that will help site owners optimize their website content, eventually allowing website owners to easily optimize their site based on how people surf their site. Think Baynote, but for the little guys. JS-Kit’s current widget suite consists of comments, five-star ratings, and a polling widget added this week. The new polling widget supports an unlimited number of questions, an expiration date, and only becomes visible after the site owner publishes it. Each widget has a fully customizable look through CSS and consists of two lines of code. The first line is a “div” tag brought to life by a second line of JavaScript code. Each widget is by default differentiated by the URL of the page it is installed on, but can also be given a unique identifier by the user so that a page can have multiple instances of a widget, such as founder Lev Walkin’s photo site. JS-Kit is combating fraud by logging a combination of user cookies, IP, and user agent. The degree of this security can be throttled by the administrator. However, one major disadvantage of the JavaScript implementation is that it will not run on sites that break JavaScript code (MySpace). Each widget also has administrative capabilities, assigned by cookie to the first computer to accesses the widget code. The administrator is able to moderate any comments that Akismet’s spam filter may miss or create new polls. JS-Kit has a user settings page that lets you view your activity across JS-Kit sites and reclaim administrator rights on a domain if you switch computers or lose the JS-Kit cookie. To make these more than just website web 2.0 “bling”, JS-Kit is letting the widgets talk to each other. So far they’ve integrated comments and ratings into one widget that allows people to leave comments along with their individual rating, which combine on → Read More
It may not be a multi-million dollar venture-backed startup, but Lev Walkin has an elegant solution to a common feature of the social web, commenting. JS-Kit is an entirely free little javascript embed that allows you to add threaded comments to any web page in one line: “<script src=”http://js-kit.com/comments.js”></script>” JS-Kit works by running Lev’s javascript code, which along with the website’s referral, fetches the appropriate comment data from his server. The comments are fully customizable by CSS and multiple comment instances can be displayed on the same referring URL by changing the “path” attribute of the comment. That way you could have a photo page with unique comment threads for each picture. However, while JS-Kit allows for a lot of customization, it still lacks some of the more advanced administrative features of fully integrated comments, such as those of our WordPress blog. Lev Walkin is a Cisco Security Engineer out of Santa Clara, and originally came up with the idea as a way to help he wife, a web designer, easily add comments to her sites. Feel free to test the script after the jump… → Read More
