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.

Echo is meant to help content sites steer the ‘conversation’ back to their blogs and news sites. As more people turn to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed, their comments can become disconnected from the original piece of content (in other words, if I read a blog post, I won’t see comments people have left about it on Twitter). Echo tries to aggregate these comments and display them beneath the original post in real-time.

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.

Another interesting note: TweetMeme is teaming with JS-Kit to add support for its real-time commenting engine Echo , which will now be able to import TweetMeme contents into blogs. TweetMeme will also begin promoting Echo, presumably in the hopes of having its reach widened as its comments appear in more blogs.

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.

For example, say users are talking about this article on Twitter. All of those tweets (that have the URL to this story attached), will be pulled into the commenting area. Same with Facebook, and Google, and Yahoo, and FriendFeed, and Digg, among others. And all of this will be populated in real-time.

And it goes both ways. Maybe you’re making a comment here but you want it to go back to Twitter or Facebook, or maybe both. ECHO handles all of that. The idea is that it doesn’t matter where the conversation is taking place, just that it is taking place, around a specific piece of content.

The service that you may be familiar with that is most similar to this is the commenting system Disqus. But that is still first and foremost a commenting system that adds these social conversation elements as a secondary part. ECHO is all about combining it all in one steady stream. And we think that’s may be the right approach, because as you can see by the retweet numbers on some of our posts, conversations are increasingly happening outside of actual content, and there should be a way to lasso it all in to the central piece being talked about.

Can such a system effectively replace the commenting structure that’s been in place basically since blogging began? That remains to be seen. It’s a pretty ambitious project, and one that is very much going to be about learning on the fly. The initial goal is to grab all of this content, and then refine how it’s displayed and presented, Loux tells us.

For example, maybe it’s not too useful to see 600 retweets by default if none are really saying anything other than the title of the story. That would just be noise. So many those should be grouped together and tucked in a collapsed thread in the stream. That is something that the ECHO team is already working on.

But then again, maybe some of those tweets are very useful as discussion elements on the site, so maybe you want those populated in the full stream. With so much data that will be coming in, it’s just hard to know for sure. And that’s why we’re just selectively testing it now, starting with this post on TechCrunchIT.

It will certainly do one thing: Shake up our commenting system that often seems repetitive, and in a real-time world, very static. Watching ECHO work, it feels much more alive, not unlike the commenting system on FriendFeed. But as we’ve written, that can have downsides too.

If ECHO is able to succeed in destroying commenting on content on the web as we know it, it will cement itself alongside a few other companies working on some interesting aspects of real-time content and conversation consumption. At a high level this of course includes Twitter and Facebook, but right below that there’s TweetMeme and Bit.ly, both of which are trying to utilize and organize the things people are saying and sharing in real-time.

And then there’s Google’s new service that everyone seems intrigued by: Wave. That’s all about real-time content creation and consumption as well, but does so in different ways depending on how it is being used. And the Wave team is adhering to the same “throw it all out there and see what works” mentality that ECHO is latching on to.

And that really speaks to the larger picture for all of this. There are a lot of interesting developments in the so-called real-time space right now (that’s obviously why we did a conference around it), but what exactly will work and what won’t remains to be seen. But something like ECHO is exciting because it really could change the way we interact with content. And hopefully, with this test, TechCrunch will be one of the very first to take the step in that direction.

JS-Kit is currently accepting applications to try out ECHO if you like what you see. You can find out more here. They are also encouraging that you submit ideas and bug reports here.

Again, this is just a test for the time being on one post to see how this system will work, so let us know what you think as well in the comments.

Update: Wow, these comments are rolling in quickly. As such, we’re starting to test some select filters, to see how that changes the flow to make it more readable. Again, this is why we’re testing it here on this one post, to see what works and what doesn’t.

Update 2: Alright, the anonymous commenters had their fun, now we’re switching to a log-in system to see how that works.

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.

On the flip side, Echo allows hyper distribution from the actual widget itself. The commenting functionality looks exactly like an email. You first identify yourself either as a guest, your Twitter handle, your Facebook profile, your blog, and more. You the are given the option to hyper-distribute your comment to a variety of social net works and sites including Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious. JS-Kit hasn’t added Facebook to the distribution channel yet.

JS-Kit’s co-founder and CEO Khris Loux told us that the startup has been using the commenting widget internally for some time now and it has changed the way people interact with comments. He says that the ability to use the widget to make a comment on another social network spreads the conversation and makes it viral. Loux adds that although commenting is updating in real-time in a stream, Echo has intense spam protection, community moderation, and filtering abilities to prevent spam or inappropriate comments from getting through.

This product is sure to bolster JS-Kit’s presence in the commenting widget arena. The startup has been steadily growing, acquiring fellow competitors SezWho and Haloscan over the past year. The company has also developed partnerships with a number of major companies, including Sun and World Now. But JS-Kit faces strong competition from Automattic, which acquired commenting system IntenseDebate, which is being incorporated into incorporated Automattic’s popular blogging platform WordPress.

Here’s the video of the demo of Echo at the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp:

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.

And aside from JS-Kit, most of these services are free, leaving them vulnerable to drops in advertising revenue and perhaps also deterring major companies from entrusting their data with them for fear that they might go belly up. In the current economy, most of the services are either forced to shut down or seek an acquisition.

Aside from its acquisition of SezWho, JS-Kit has also bolstered its presence with the acquisition of Haloscan last summer. The company has also established partnerships with a number of major companies, including Sun and World Now.

Some of the smaller services may be dying out, but JS-Kit still has some strong competition. Last fall IntenseDebate, another commenting system, was acquired by Automattic, the company behind the incredibly popular WordPress blog platform. IntenseDebate continues to operate on other blog platforms, and is also slowly having its technology incorporated into WordPress itself.

Another increasingly important player in this space is Facebook, which just released a new commenting widget that allows sites to quickly integrate Facebook Connect with only a few lines of code. Users can have their comments relayed back to their Facebook News Feeds, where the conversation can continue. Some large sites have little interest in handing over their data to Facebook without getting much in return, but it’s a system your everyday blogger will love. And that’s a scary prospect for the rest of the widget makers.

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.

The new features comes right after the announcement that Facebook Connect had been made available to any of the 600,000 blogs and sites that are using the JS-Kit commenting widget, and after the system enabled commenters to add YouTube videos to their feedback.

In other news, JS-Kit has also been upgraded to support OpenID 2.0, not really a surprise as DataPortability co-founder and evangelist Chris Saad works for the company.

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.

Other blogs are adopting Google’s Friend Connect (which lets people login with various email credentials, or even Twitter). JS-Kit is also working on adding Friend Connect, as well as MySpace ID as login options.

All of this choice is great, except that already there are six different login options in The JS-Kit widget (Guest, Existing JS-Kit, New JS-Kit, Haloscan, OpenID, FB Connect). Pretty soon we’ll need the equivalent of a “Share This” button, perhaps a “Universal ID” button, that will then open up to all the options. But I think that’s too much. Engineers may feel it is egalitarian, but consumers run away when they are presented with more than 3 or 4 options.

That is why I think Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will win in the end (Sorry, MySpace). People may have IDs for the various blogging platforms or commenting systems, but most don’t identify with them. It is a necessary inconvenience. They identify with Facebook or their email because that is where they manage their personal and professional lives.

In addition to replicating the comments on your Facebook News feed, the JS-Kit implementation also supports embedding Facebook photos and YouTube videos directly into the comments. It makes commenting much more personal when you know your friends will see it in Facebook. It also has the potential to reduce the amount of comment trolling and general incivility that has taken over many blog comments (we hope).

Update: No sooner did I post this than I learned that not only is Disqus working on a Facebook Connect plugin, but so is Six Apart (for Movable Type), WordPress, and MediaWiki. Here is an entire Facebook Connect plugin directory. Grou.ps is also adding FB Connect.

Update: looks like alarm:clock jumped the shark gun on this one. coComment CEO Matt Colebourne got back to our e-mail and says rumors about an acquisition are false, and that there will be an announcement about a partnership or some other kind of collaboration between the two startups soon. JS-Kit’s Chris Saad (who is also co-founder of DataPortability and Media 2.0 Workgroup) checked in as well to say there will be an announcement soon, yet declines to share details.

Update 2 with details of the announcement made:

Henceforth, coComment will automatically track comments from all sites enabled with JS-Kit Commenting, on a fully opt-in/out basis, so brand owners can easily follow consumer opinions on more than 600,000 sites. coComment will now offer JS-Kit commenting (and Rating, Reviews and Polls) to sites. coComment and JS-Kit confirmed that all existing users of coComment’s Site Comments engine will continue to be fully supported and will not be inconvenienced.

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 backed by even more venture capital: it had raised a total of $5.6 million from Swisscom and the Japanese Netage Capital Partners. This leads us to believe coComment simply ran out of money and chose to merge with a company offering a similar service rather than dying. Alarm:clock adds that coComment’s US employees (their headquarters are in Switzerland) are being offered jobs at JS-Kit or unceremonously fired.

coComment is a service that essentially lets people keep track of all their separate comments and discussions across the web, notifying users of newly posted comments while displaying any comments and conversations that a user may be tracking on sites such as blogs, news, photo sharing, and social bookmarking sites.

JS-Kit’s widget library already includes a commenting system, as well as ratings, polls and reviews, all of which can be embedded on a web page with a short snippet of code. Over the summer, JS-Kit acquired HaloScan, another commenting system, to improve its global profiles and better integrate with blog platforms.

Hence the title of consolidation in the online conversation world. You may remember SezWho acquired a contextual analysis startup called Tejit last May, and Automattic (the company behind WordPress) also made two acquisitions in this space after last summer: Intense Debate and Polldaddy.

Other players include Disqus and Tangler.

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.

JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux says that the partnership will expose his widgets to 300,000 potential new sites though Userplane’s distribution channels. The deal gives further credibility to the JS-Kit brand, which has recently been added to Brightcove 3 through its API and has scored a number of other large partnerships. Last week the company raised $3.6 million in Series B funding.

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.

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.

Another feature will be easier synchronization with WordPress and Blogger. This could allow for easier adoption by existing blogs, with the automatic import of older comments from either site. In addition to the easier import, JS-Kit will also update a participating blog’s WordPress or Blogger comments when new comments are made in the widget.

This also goes hand-in-hand with another new feature that JS-Kit is implementing, SEO support. JS-Kit now sets up a static page for indexing comment content, which you can host on your server as a sub-domain, so search engines see the content on your site, and not JS-Kit’s.

There is no back end network to JS-Kit like competing comment providers Disqus and Sezwho. Disqus and Sezwho offer social networks based on the comments left in participating blogs, leading to better content discovery. The competition has significantly less users than JS-Kit (reportedly 550,000 participating sites, 8 million users, 80 million comments left), so JS-Kit adding a social network functionality to Haloscan’s already massive user base potentially puts them on top of the market. But Disqus has been gaining a lot of momentum (reporting 20,000 participating blogs), and could give JS-Kit some very real competition.

One major difference is that Disqus uses a proprietary login system, while JS-Kit uses OpenID, which is what the social web is trending towards. To get involved in the Disqus community for a blog, users are directed to the Disqus site, instead of remaining on the blog, like with JS-Kit, which may explain why the Compete graph below shows Disqus gaining so fast on Haloscan. The graph does not count widget users.

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.

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 marketing and “SEO stuff” how directories and local search engines make money, by selling ads to those guys? “Web publishers will start competing using the truth,” responds Loux, always the idealist. Yet business directory sites like MojoPages and Spoke are already working to integrate the background-check widgets into their listings. If bigger sites like Yelp or CitySearch ever followed suit, unscrupulous contractors would have nowhere left to hide.

You can try it here by clicking on each contractor’s name in the simplified listings at left. The top one has a green check, the bottom one has a red check. When the widget pops up, click on the different tabs for more information.

The idea behind this widget goes way beyond exposing Experian’s data, although that is pretty awesome in and of itself. The widget can have many tabs, each with a different source of data. Loux has also struck a deal with JD Power to provide product review summaries, and with FamilyWatchDog to incorporate its health records for restaurants, product-recall information, sex offender listings. He has hopes for convincing more companies to add their data for job listings and other categories.

At this point, Loux’s widget is disruptive only in its potential. But if he can get it adopted by both enough data and listings providers, he argues that it could start to impact everything from search to banner ads.

Everyone wanders around on the Web in a dog pattern. You start at Google, look around, and go back. And every time you go back to Google they go, “Ka-ching!” This is the promise of Web 2.0 that has not been delivered yet—these fine connections. It is a big threat to PageRank and the inefficiency of Internet advertising, because everything you want is at you fingertips.

PageRank will no doubt survive the onslaught of Khris Loux and his widgeteers. But he does raise a compelling point about the power of widgets to distribute information to people where they need it. And the idea of spreading information from trusted sources across the Web to counter the (mis)messaging of marketers and vocal users who might happen to be wrong is also something that more Websites should think about doing.

Outbrain is creating a ratings and recommendation platform for blogs and news feeds. So far it has developed a rating widget that can be placed at the end of every blog post or news feed item so that readers can rate each one. Outbrain wants to use these widgets to create a cross-blog/news recommendation system using collaborative filtering techniques similar to what you find on Amazon.com for products. “Readers like you also liked:” X. Nobody has to register. Outbrain makes its inferences anonymously based on cookies. Explains Galai:

With every rating that’s cast to our system, we constantly tweak the ‘closeness’ of each reader to all other readers who ever rated anything. We then give your like-minded readers a higher weight when making recommendations for you. So the more items you rate (and rate honestly), the better your personalized recommendations should get.

This is in contrast to the folks that do ‘related articles’ functionality which is based purely on the content of the post. Those by definition are one-size-fits-all recommendations which we do not believe are very effective. So while others try to target recommendations that are relevant to the content, we are trying to target recommendations that are relevant to the readers.

Outbrain’s widget can be installed on most blogging and RSS platforms, including Blogger.com, TypePad, WordPress.org, Drupal, FeedFlare, and MoveableType. Bloggers can grab it here. It competes with other rating and recommendation widgets out there, including JS-Kit’s rating widget and Criteo’s Autoroll widget that creates reader-centric blogrolls.

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.

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.

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.

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 the server side into one overall rating for the object the widget is attached to. On top of these widgets, JS-Kit will be releasing a meta-widget later this week so that surfers can receive recommendations for your site’s top content (pictured right).

Comment and rating widget after the jump…

"<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…

Note: JS-Kit will forward comments from your thread to your email if you provide it.