After declaring the world of traditional comments dead last year, Echo has continued its quest to bring the world of real time reactions from around the Web to publishers looking to surface more engagement with their community. Today, Echo introduces a product they call "Echo River", which brings responses from commenters to media stories practically to equal footing of that of the author, raising the visibility and surfacing real-time feedback that practically promises to make sites more sticky as users participate.

Last month, Echo introduced a "Recent Comments" widget, which brought the newest responses to the front of the site. This new real-time widget updates live, not requiring refresh. It plays a key role in this morning's update, as the comments widget runs alongside River-enabled sites, which also display real-time comment counts for new entries, and nests the reactions (be they from comments on the site, Twitter, Digg or other sources) below the entry.


Echo, which has a wide array of large media customers in its roster, highlighted its River offering with staged demos on Slate.com, TechCrunch and Mashable. The River function even managed to pull comments from disparate technology sources, such as WordPress (on TechCrunch) and Disqus (from Mashable). This move further separates Echo from its assumed competition, and puts them more into the real-time space, rather than vanilla comments.

"Displaying conversations on the home page in this way changes the way people see the front page of a typical news site," said Chris Saad, VP of Strategy for Echo in a press release. "Readers get to see a summary of what people like them are saying right from the front page, getting a new perspective on the headlines of the day... This new product continues our mission to turn static web pages into vibrant real-time experiences, driving Facebook style engagement on our publisher sites."


While the old way of comments might be dead, by their positioning, what this new product does do, for its premium members, is practically give sites' community equal prominence to that of the original writer, who sees their work do battle with often opinionated readers. And if a conversation flareup does ignite, Echo will show each update in real time. It's enough of a push that the service's executives used lofty phrases about changing the world of publishing "one product at a time", fighting against a world of static media.

For premium subscribers to Echo, adding the new River functionality is simple, just requiring a little Javascript code. The company says the River can be customized as to its content and appearance.

Disclosure: Chris Saad of Echo and I occsionally co-host the Edge Theory Conversations podcast.

When JS-Kit first announced their Echo platform, declaring the death of comments, many thought it to be hyperbole. But as we have seen with a metamorphosis of the way people react to content around the Web, sharing it downstream with followers on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and many other outposts, blog comments no longer hold the lofty role they once did, and it has become increasingly important to discover reactions - wherever they are. Since that announcement almost a year ago, JS-Kit rebranded as Echo, and has been promoting their premium reaction platform to more than just blogs - but old media titans. Today, the company announced a wide array of publishers who have chosen Echo to capture their real-time reaction stream.

Included in the morning's announcement were names such as The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Forbes, and Sports Illustrated. In a quick e-mail announcement the company said they were "extremely excited and gratified to be working with these high profile and influential brands, helping each of them create real-time conversations on their sites."

In parallel, the company also relaunched its Web site, now at http://aboutecho.com/.

Unlike its Web 2.0 cousin, Disqus, Echo is not focused on offering a free comment platform for bloggers, and has been creating a robust system that starts at $99 a year. For its part, Disqus announced the acquisition of Harvard Business Review as a customer today. Also, recently, Intense Debate, the quietest of the three offerings, was selected by TechCrunch as the tech blog's comments engine.

Echo's announcement can also be found on their Web site: Echo partners with Washington Post, Time, Forbes and others

Last year, I highlighted ten top Web services that debuted in the year, from Socialmedian to BackType and Feedly. Not an all-encompassing list, blogging colleague Robert Scoble asked if "I was right", adding on a few of his own.

With 2009 coming to a close, I thought it made sense to highlight some of my own personal favorites which are gaining traction. Keep in mind that I am not ranking these services necessarily in a most important to least important order, and I am ignoring some other top services (for example, Foursquare, which launched in March, or some Zynga properties), due to my own non-use.

As with 2008, many services debuted in 2009 that were not stand-alone services, but instead, hooked into existing environments, like Twitter and Facebook, or the iPhone.

1) Pubsubhubbub

2009 was all about real-time and moving data more quickly from place to place. No technology or service better epitomized that than Pubsubhubbub, an open protocol engineered from a team of Googlers who were looking to accelerate the delivery of updates between services with near-zero latency. Pubsubhubbub's simplicity and clear benefits resulted in many major services adopting it and virtually eliminating the expected wait times for aggregators and readers to get updates, while also reducing the need for said aggregators to repeatedly poll content sources.

Pubsubhubbub, adopted by Blogger, FeedBurner, Cliqset, FriendFeed and many others, also spurred into action the launch of Dave Winer's RSSCloud, adopted by Wordpress for similar purposes. The launch of Pubsubhubbub also fed the growth of Superfeedr, an increasingly popular utility that aims to deliver real-time notifications via the cloud.

2) Google Wave

Google Wave made a huge splash in 2009. (Review) If you weren't trying it out and aiming to find out what value it actually brought, it was probably because you were begging for an invite and hadn't found one yet. The real-time collaboration tool was mischaracterized by many who thought it could replace e-mail, or different social networks' activity, and it hasn't found too many people relying on it as a core service yet, but its innovation has many looking to see what the end game looks like.

3) Square

Although extremely new, Jack Dorsey's follow-up to Twitter, Square, is very alluring. A simple hardware add-on to the iPhone (and in the future, other mobile devices), Square lets any individual accept credit card transactions, verifies the purchaser, and provides the purchaser with an electronic record of the activity via their Web site.

Dorsey and team skillfully looked at a daunting world of differing devices and managed to find the commonalities between them (an audio port to be specific) and delivered something that could potentially change the game for small merchants and individuals, providing true mobile commerce that doesn't require cash.

4) Echo

The launch of JS-Kit's Echo product was such a big move for the company that they changed their name to reflect it. Echo, recognizing the sea change evident in social media that has moved much of the discussion of content away from core blogs, aggregated downstream activity at the host blog, including retweets and other social network reactions.

In addition, Echo brought real-time to everyone's comment stream, turning a once static entity into a live chat room. You can see Echo in action on popular sites including those from Brian Solis and 1938media.

5) my6sense

With more data coming in from more sources than ever, it is unlikely that most people are following fewer people or feeds at the end of 2009 than they were at the beginning of the year. Combined with a rise in mobile Web access, and you can see how my6sense's digital intuition for RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook makes sense, surfacing relevant data that is customized just for you.

The company has an iPhone app available, free, now, and has publicly promised that Android development is planned in the short term. Keep in mind that I am helping to advise the service, but I have been impressed with their offering, and see the issue of curation as one that many services will tackle in 2010.

6) Brizzly

Brizzly, a product from Thing Labs, is one of the more novel approaches to consuming one's Twitter and Facebook streams. The first to enable in-line viewing of images and video, the addition of customized trend definitions and novel approaches to direct messages and multiple account support, Brizzly is a compelling Web-based alternative to the standard interface from Twitter and competing clients, such as Seesmic.

Earlier in the year, Thing Labs also introduced Plinky, which while cute, doesn't look to be setting the world on fire.

7) Lazyfeed

For a technology supposedly on its last legs, RSS sure had a lot of very interesting innovation in 2009 (See also: Pubsubhubbub and my6sense). Lazyfeed came on the scene this summer with a real-time approach to feed discovery and the ability to follow several topics at once. A live interface and rapidly displayed content has made the product easily among the most fun ways to take in a lot of information, while keeping things "lazy".

With the slowing of central directories like Technorati, Lazyfeed became one of the best sites for me to use to find new sources who were discussing topics I was interested in, letting me add them to my reading list.

8) Flickchart

In May, Flickchart introduced a site for comparing your favorite movies, across time, genres, or even against your previous picks. Although simple, the "pick your favorite" approach became very addicting, and the site now sports more than 40,000 registered users, who have contributed more than 60 million rankings. (See blog post)

One of the unexpected side benefits of Flickchart for me was finding top movies rated by friends which I had never seen, which spurred me to finally add them to my iTunes or NetFlix.

9) Lunch.com and Simler

I am combining both Lunch.com and Simler, as both sites seem to be in their growth stages, and have similar goals - helping you to find interesting people who share the same interests. Lunch.com asks you for your spheres of interests, and to rank specific items on a -5 to +5 scale. In contrast, Simler asks you to add tags that describe your interests, and links you with those others who have also added the same tags.

Both Lunch.com and Simler suggest that you post new items to topic-oriented pages, and engage in discussion with others in your network. Lunch.com seems to be more product-oriented, while Simler is more focused on more abstract things, such as television, music and technology. Simler, like my6sense, is a client of Paladin.

10) Tweetie

If Brizzly was included, it also makes sense that Tweetie makes the list, even if it has no specific Web-only interface. Tweetie has become the gold standard for Twitter clients on the iPhone, and was among the first to incorporate many of the advanced capabilities introduced by Twitter, including Lists, geolocation, and retweets. Tweetie also has a solid Macintosh version, which I use often.

Also on this year's list but outside of the top 10:
Blippy, Cadmus, Cliqset, Gowalla, Salmon, Twazzup

What did I miss, overlook or understimate in 2009? Let me know. I am sure you have some better ideas.

As comments on the Web become fragmented, conversations that occur on downstream aggregation sites often are taking place in a silo, disjointed from parallel discussions on the originating Web site. Over the last two years, many people have found this evolution controversial, hoping to unify the conversations in a central location - and some services, including JS-Kit's Echo and Disqus, have taken the first step by pulling external discussions to the source. But a brand new proposal, authored by John Panzer of Blogger, called the Salmon Protocol, is looking to take advantage of Pubsubhubbub to unify the conversations in all places, both upstream and downstream. And yes... the name of Salmon comes because those fish manage to swim upstream, just like the comments.



An Initial Presentation on the Salmon Protocol
As discussed in Friday's panel at Blog World Expo on technology and the real-time Web, Pubsubhubbub essentially works as a middle-man conduit, taking information from a data's source passing along changed data to downstream destination sites. The proposed Salmon Protocol would similarly watch both source and destination sites for comments, and upon discovering new comments, it would send the new comments to the site which is lacking the full conversation. If multiple downstream destinations are designated, the Salmon Protocol will also populate these multiple sites.

In conjunction with Pubsubhubbub, the Salmon Protocol leverages the newest iteration of webfinger, enabling publishers to receive comments and verify subscribers - as a form of true identity recognition, similar to how both Disqus and JS-Kit have you register for individual accounts with either service. An additional side benefit to leveraging Webfinger would be to dramatically reduce the potential for spam, assuming each individual has a unique ID.

The debate over fractured conversations has risen and fallen over the last two years. In September, I essentially said I was done listening to people complain about the issue after hearing complaints regarding Google SideWiki - as I believe people will want to have conversations where they are comfortable, and that they shouldn't be forced to come back to a single source. This is a point I have been hammering since the first major flareup back in April of 2008. (See: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?)

Many people believe that transporting comments from one site to another and making the conversations one could cause confusion, or even make potential commenters uncomfortable. With this in mind, John has suggested that users "be made aware of the publishing scope of the comments they leave," adding "For some aggregators, this may be implied (all data is public), for others a warning or a checkbox may be necessary." (See: Salmon Protocol (Draft) Protocol Summary)



A Test Comment from the Aggregator Via Salmon


The Resulting Comment Back On the Blog Via Salmon
There is a test playground for the Salmon Protocol, and I can verify that it already works. If you want to test it, one option is to take a testbed Blogger account and point the Salmon Protocol your way. It occurs automatically, and comments that happen on the downstream aggregator will make it back to the blog immediately, thanks to Pubsubhubbub. Now, the quest becomes to turn this brand-new protocol into a new standard - one that could pose a serious challenge to services like JS-Kit Echo and Disqus, even including threaded replies. If done well, the long debate over unified conversations could soon be over.

Learn more at: http://www.salmon-protocol.org/.

There are a select few Web 2.0 companies who have suffered such a roller coaster of peaks and valleys the way Technorati has. Once a clear industry leader for blog search, statistics, and individual site "authority", Technorati's influence withered away thanks to an aggressive push by Google into the blog search arena, statistical gaming by number-crazed bloggers, management changes, odd product launches, and inconsistent uptime. But with a major relaunch tonight, the company has tried to throw off the shackles of the old and rise again, armed with more cash in the bank, a talented editorial staff, and a new look. All of a sudden, the site looks relevant again.

Back in early 2007, Technorati was among one of the favorite topics on this blog. You could see the tumult at the company, as then-CEO David Sifry wrote on a Tuesday in a comment here that he was "very very happy at Technorati", only to announce he was looking for a new CEO that Friday, three days later. You could see debate that summer over people trying to game the then much-watched "Authority", which counted up external links to your site in a six month period. But by early 2008, we were using phrases to discuss the company that included "totally toast", and the new Twitter generation, less than two years removed from Technorati's heyday, scarcely remembers the once respected innovator.


Rising and Falling Blogs On Technorati
But as of tonight, they are back in the game. They ditched the old metrics for attributing authority, as it was considered too static, and now will aim to reward authors for posting frequency, context and linking behavior. Interestingly, they have also introduced authority by topics, meaning that technology blogs can be compared to others in their sector, as can sports blogs, music blogs, and so on. This means that aside from the overall Top 100, sites like TechCrunch don't have to measured head to head against Huffington Post, and we smaller blogs can get a better idea of who our peers are. (See:
A Totally New Technorati.com & Technorati Media Rising)


It's Nice to Be Considered a Top 100 Tech Blog
This new ranking system is looking to be more dynamic - changing along with the real-time nature of the Web. Blogs will rise and fall, and be noted on the site. Blogs and individual posts will be featured, and "hot blogosphere items" of all topics can make the front page.


An Individual Blog's Technorati Profile
Occasional louisgray.com contributor and friend to the site, Eric Berlin, is the blogging channel editor, so we wish him well and look forward to hearing more about that role. Additionally, JS-Kit's Echo will enable comments to be placed underneath all blog listings and tags, possibly adding conversation to the data.

Technorati may not be the big giant we once thought they would be, and they will need to have some consistent successes to become a blogosphere darling again, but they are back in the conversation and worth watching.

See Also:
VentureBeat: Big changes coming at Technorati — the CEO’s perspective
TechCrunch: The New Technorati

The world of comments on blogs has changed quite a lot just in the past few years. Once the central discussion point for all activity around posts, comments have become distributed, floating to a myriad of social networks and RSS feed readers, while still others are simply retweeting the items they like. The changes were enough to see one comment provider, JS-Kit, say that comments were "dead". Meanwhile, amidst the noise, Disqus has rolled out version 3 of its product today, providing a new, smoother look and feel, and most-importantly for today's Web, real-time updating and greatly improved "reactions" that pull in activity from around the Internet.


Disqus Has Now Split Into Two With Profiles and Comments
In parallel with the company's revamp of its comments engine, Disqus has also added a separate product, called your Profile, which lets users add or delete comments, without impacting the original site, and also presents yet another place to add your third party services, so you can tie all your activities on a post through your profile. Other benefits include a personal URL, such as http://www.disqus.com/louismg for me.


My New Disqus Profile


The New Look of Disqus Comments
Disqus's improvements are coming none too soon. With a great deal of comments taking place elsewhere, as I mentioned with my recent post on Google Reader, and have seen with various sites trying out JS-Kit's Echo platform, the world of comments on the blog has to adapt. I just wonder how the real-time aspect of comments can keep people on the site instead of venturing somewhere else, where they may have established a community. I am looking forward to seeing Disqus 3 play a more connected role to the social ecosystem.

There is no question that as activity on social networks has broadened, conversations have become decentralized and distributed. Only a short few years ago, bloggers could anticipate their posts would rile up deep conversations on their blogs, through comments below each post. But for many people, the trends have been for conversations to happen elsewhere - on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook or practically anywhere people wish them to be.

As a result, new tools have cropped up to monitor the conversations, or to unify them, regardless of their source. Among the most visible has been BackType, which offers comment search, as well as a tool called BackType Connect, which centralizes reactions for Wordpress-powered blogs.

Today, one of the most popular comment engines, JS-Kit, says they too are moving to this model, and not just halfway. Their old platform is dead. Period. Starting today, users will be presented with a new platform called Echo that integrates reactions from around the Web, including those from these diversified, decentralized conversations, alongside standard comments. Existing users of JS-Kit will be upgraded to the Echo platform.

"We are here to announce the death of comments," said Khris Loux. "What's interesting about these new forms of communication is that they are parallel channels away from your blog. We are discontinuing JS-Kit comments because it no longer reflects the conversation around the blog."

Echo is a drop-in comment replacement platfom. Now, they say, references to your original content will be automatically displayed in real-time.

"Echo-enabled content is now the richest source of the conversation. They can go to your blog and see the entire live stream," Loux said.

Loux and Chris Saad, also of JS-Kit, said that bloggers who are using alternative platforms, like Disqus, could use the tool for future conversations, and they could import and export comments from platforms like Blogger.