The Inquisitr » sezwho

And then there was three: JS-Kit acquires SezWho

Duncan Riley — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:08:31 +0000

In the biggest shakeup to hit the commenting 2.0 space so far, JS-Kit has announced the acquisition of rival SezWho.

The acquisition was made after SezWho was unable to raise a new round needed to continue operations.

Under the deal, SezWho will close down in 30 days, with publishers being offered the ability to transition to JS-Kit’s commenting platform. JS-Kit previously acquired smaller player Haloscan in July 2008, and signed a strategic partnership with coCommen in November.

The acquisition cements JS-Kit’s place as the largest commenting 2.0 provider, and offers further strength in its battle against the Automattic owned IntenseDebate, and the still independent Disqus.

Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched

Duncan Riley — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:07:30 +0000

There’s nothing worse as a blog owner to discover that your site isn’t loading properly. Saturday night at 10pm my time (3am PST Saturday) just before I was going to switch off for the night, The Inquisitr started doing funny things, like not loading the front page. I fired up Firebug to troubleshoot, and quickly discovered the issue was one of the Disqus widgets we had in the sidebar.

Disqus has experienced some downtime this year. Bloggers using a local install of WordPress and running the API plugin don’t have much to fear: comments revert to native WordPress comments when Disqus is down. Someone asked me this week if we’d dumped Disqus because one recent post wasn’t showing Disqus, so they were down at some stage earlier in the week as well. But that’s great if you’re only using Disqus for commenting: if you’re running widgets from Disqus there’s no fall back; if they don’t load, they stop everything past that point, as they did with The Inquisitr Saturday. The answer of course is to not run Disqus widgets, but we’ll get to that in a second.

Whether it was Disqus alone with issues I’m not sure. Ripping out the Disqus widgets caused more of the site to load, and then Outbrain was slowing things down a lot, so both may share a data center. I checked the one site I knew was running both: LouisGray.com and it was having the same issues. Our Technorati Engage 125px units also started throwing errors, so they’re still down today, along with FriendFeed integration.

I pinged Louis and his wise advice was that sometimes sites have outages, and it was the middle of then night so it wasn’t an issue for him. He’s right about it happening, but I don’t have to like it. For a 2 hour period we had only 200 visitors when we’d usually have 2000-4000, so it hurt.

In my anger I started shopping around for a Disqus alternative. SezWho and Intense Debate were the two sites I hit (JS-Kit is another service), and I decided to play with Intense Debate; it’s a small thing but Intense Debate offers far more information on their service than SezWho does, and it was the selling point.

I briefly ran Intense Debate here on The Inquisitr before switching Disqus back on once the issues had passed. Disqus is still running as I write this post, but I won’t commit long term to keeping it this way. Here’s why I nearly switched, and why I might yet.

Intense Debate For

Integrated WordPress commenting: no iFrame for Intense Debate, instead all comments are shown natively in WordPress. It’s an “advanced” view that delivers Intense Debate services in the one spot. Disqus by comparison has a highly confused interface: for example you don’t have all moderation features in their admin view, but you do on the post itself. In WordPress you get an iFrame.

Integrated FriendFeed comments: if I switch this will be a big selling point. Intense Debate imports FriendFeed comments into the comment thread itself, so they just look like standard comments. We’ve previously been running them here at The Inquisitr, but they aren’t combined in the comment thread. Disqus has previously talked about doing this, but they don’t do it today that I’m aware of.

Integrated Twitter support: not a huge selling point, but at a time where Twitter has never been more popular, the option to allow users to Tweet their comment complete with link can only help drive traffic back to your site. Disqus doesn’t offer anything similar.

Reputation Management: Both offer reputation management, but with Intense Debate it’s a stronger part of the presentation.

Disqus for

Better looks on site: You can customize CSS with Intense Debate embeds, but out of the box I prefer Disqus for looks. Intense Debate was more imposing on the page, from aggresive feature boxes through to a big “powered by Intense Debate” line at the base of the comments.

Bugs: One of the reasons I didn’t stick with Intense Debate was bugs; I’d swapped out Disqus due to server issues on their end, but the Intense Debate code caused local issues with their plugin and code base. I jumped on their support forums and others had reported issues as well. Better still, at the time of writing Intense Debate doesn’t support WordPress 2.7, which is all the more bizarre when you consider it’s owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress itself.

Community: The biggest reason I’m sticking with Disqus for the time being. I’m sure Intense Debate has a reasonable community, but I know among our regular readers that many have Disqus accounts. I also know many others sites we link to and share with run Disqus as well. Community is THE KEY selling point to Disqus, it was one of the reasons I cited when we signed up, it’s a key reason why using Disqus has driven comment growth here, and dumping Disqus risks the inverse effect of costing us commenters, and it’s a gamble I’d rather not make, at least now.

Better Widgets: when they work, Disqus widgets integrate better on blogs, and I use two of them for that very reason. The widgets for Intense Debate felt clunky, didn’t integrate well, and needed hacking for better looks. Lazy perhaps, but Disqus is better out of the box.

Underdog: I like supporting Disqus because they are a small, independent startup, and it helps that CEO Daniel Ha is a great bloke who can’t do enough to help you when you get stuck (well accept in the middle of the night naturally ). Intense Debate is an Automattic service, a big company with a near monopoly on self hosted blogs. Competition is best encouraged by supporting (within reason) the little guy.

Conclusion

As much as I’ll never get my lost sleep back from Saturday night (the light went out at 3am) my annoyance with Disqus gave me the opportunity to seriously look at Intense Debate, and I’m grateful that I did. It’s an impressive service, with many strong selling points. Competition in the market drives players to continually improve their service and features, and Disqus can easily improve in a number of areas based on what Intense Debate is doing. Disqus has my business for now, but that business could be snatched away in the future should a competitor be able to mount a strong enough reason to switch.

If you’re starting a new blog, or haven’t joined the commenting 2.0 revolution, you should have Intense Debate on your list. The switching path is easier than Disqus, and you could do far worse.

JS-Kit lands Userplane deal

Duncan Riley — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:42:49 +0000

Commenting 2.0 and website widget provide JS-Kit has announced a new deal with Userplane that will see customers from both companies gaining access to new tools.

The AOL owned Userplane offers a variety of free and premium publisher tools, including message boards, chat, AIR applications and multimedia tools.

Userplane will offer JS-Kit’s Ratings service through Userplane’s distribution channels. JS-Kit will add Userplane’s Webchat application to its product offering. Combined the two companies will have a reach of over 900,000 registered publishers.

And so the battle for numbers continues in this space. JS-Kit announced $3.6 million in new funding October 14.

SezWho announces enhanced features, new partnership with Instablogs

Duncan Riley — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:00:12 +0000

Commenting 2.0 service SezWho has today launched a number of new features, and announced a new partnership with Instablogs.

New SezWho functionality includes four new profile templates, including support for popular threaded discussion formats. More importantly for site owners, SezWho now offers support for local CSS and JavaScript. Other new features include Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down ratings for posts, configurable pop-ups, improved support for filtering, support for multiple WordPress installations in a single database, and easier upgrading.

SezWho has also announced a new partnership with Instablogs, that will see SezWho bring reputation management and universal profiles and content to Instablog readers. Instablogs’ readers can now rate posts and user-generated content on Instablogs and across other SezWho-enabled social media sites, including blogs, discussion forums, and bulletin boards.

The new features will be a welcome addition to SezWho users, and help the service define itself in a competitive space. The deal with Instablogs sees SezWho now powering a number of leading blog networks, including Creative Webloging.

SezWho

Disqus releases a full public API

Duncan Riley — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:16:42 +0000

Commenting 2.0 startup Disqus has launched a full public API for the first time, allow developers to build new tools that utilize Disqus.

The API itself has been is use for sometime, with an official WordPress plugin using the API instead of javascript to deliver SEO friendly commenting on WordPress blogs. We’ve been using the API plugin from the day with started using Disqus, and we have no complaints.

CEO Daniel Ha notes that developers can use the API to create import tools, export tools, or even a custom Disqus plugin for any platforms. This will allow users to create Disqus tools and plugins on platforms such as up and coming blogging platfrom Habari.

It’s a positive step forward for Disqus in the ongoing battle for users currently taking place between services in this space including JS-Kit, SezWho and the now Automattic owned Intense Debate.

Full documentation of the Disqus API can be found here.

Disqus

Deals: Voxant, Intense Debate change hands

Duncan Riley — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:12:39 +0000

Two interesting acquisitions related to blogging this week: licensed video provider Voxant has changed hands along with commenting 2.0 service Intense Debate.

Voxant offers licensed videos from media outlets, including AP for use on websites. For bloggers the service also offers $7 CPM on ads shown with the videos, and attractive offering (we use them on occasion), although their catalog is not as extensive as competitor Clipsyndicate. Depending on the report, Voxant was either acquired or merged with Anystream, a provider of video encoding and content management to media companies including CNN and Sky. Financial details were not disclosed, but the statement from Anystream notes that the combined product will offer more content and become a leading playing the space.

Commenting 2.0 service Intense Debate, a competitor of Disqus, SezWho and JS-Kit but not widely used as it hasn’t yet launched (it’s still in closed beta) was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Mashable reports that the deal will see Intense Debate rolled out across millions of blogs on the WordPress.com network, delivering the service a massive boost at a time all competitors are looking for more users.

SezWho lands b5media entertainment blogs

Duncan Riley — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 01:28:09 +0000

Blogging 2.0 comment service SezWho has signed a deal with b5media that will see SezWho rolled out on b5media’s entertainment blogs.

b5media’s entertainment blogs have long been the backbone of the network in terms of traffic, delivering millions of pages views by targeting niche verticals, such as dedicating blogs to specific stars and shows as opposed to offering one central blog. The network recently launched Starked.com as a portal for the entertainment sites and branding exercise for the blogs.

For SezWho, the b5media deal follows similar deals with Entrecard, Creative Weblogging and Izea in July and continues the arms race of numbers in the space where the various competitors are seeking to become the default commenting 2.0 service by having the biggest install base. In terms of exposure, the deal will expose SezWho to potentially millions of new users, although I am surprised the deal didn’t extend to b5media’s full network; perhaps it’s a try before they fully buy deal.

Disclosure: I am a founder of b5media, although I have no relationship with the company today, nor did I discuss this post with anyone within b5media prior to publication.

b5media

Disqus responds to critics: local comment hosting

Duncan Riley — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:00:36 +0000

2.0 commenting service Disqus today launches Disqus 2.0 with a range of new features including local comment hosting.

One of the most common arguments against using Disqus has been the hosted nature of the service, with comments residing on Disqus alone without a local copy. The new Disqus confronts the criticism head on, by offering a new API driven WordPress plugin that stores comments locally as well as on Disqus itself. The feature allows users to try Disqus at any time then leave the service without every having to worry about comment storage. Disqus CEO Daniel Ha tells me that there is has been a great emphasis in the new version of making sure that comments on each blog can be seen by search engines, delivering a completely SEO friendly package.

The new Disqus offers automatic data sync between Disqus and the local database so blogs are never out of date, seamless import/export of old and new comments allowing users to embrace Disqus in full on existing blogs, and the ability to moderate comments from within WordPress itself.

The Disqus site has undergone a large reorganization and redesign to be more intuitive, useful, and accessible. Users now have immediate access to their (and friends) comments to track and manage the discussion.

In the added or improved list includes adding moderators, setting permissions, block lists and comment system configuration.

In an interesting new offering, user profiles can now act as comment blogs. Comments are displayed as blog entries with appropriate context so people can share their contributions on other sites with friends and fans.

Disqus has found strong support in a competitive market that includes Sezwho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit. Disqus is now used on over 30,000 sites, and Ha believes that with the new features and emphasis on a strong API and local data retention that this figure will continue to grow.

The last excuse for you not to try Disqus has just been hit on the head.

Disqus

SezWho Signs Deals with Entrecard, Creative Weblogging and Izea

Duncan Riley — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:00:17 +0000

Commenting 2.0 provider SezWho has signed distrubition deals with Entrecard, Creative Weblogging, and Izea that will see SezWho reputation profiles exposed to millions of new users.

Entrecard’s blog ad network has added SezWho as a way to reward bloggers who participate on the site. Bloggers whose SezWho comments receive high ratings through SezWho will receive Entrecard credits to be spent on advertisements within the 14,000 strong Entrecard advertising network.

Blog network Creative Weblogging will offer SezWho reputation-driven user profiles across its network, and Izea will use SezWho to power its SocialSpark Solution Center.

The commenting 2.0 space has turned into a numbers race as the various players look to increase their presence. These three deals give SezWho a serious leg up against rivals including Intense Debate and Disqus. There is room for multiple players in the space, but the service with more eyeballs will ultimately come out on top, and perhaps go on to become the Google of the 2.0 commenting space. Expect more deals like these in the coming months.

SezWho

JS-Kit acquires HaloScan, but why trash talk Disqus?

Duncan Riley — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:32:58 +0000

Blog toolkit provider JS-Kit has acquired blog commenting service HaloScan. Haloscan offers a blog commenting system that competes in the commenting 2.0 space against Disqus, Sezwho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit itself. JS-Kit had previously partnered with Haloscan to offer JS-Kit’s rating tools within HaloScan powered comment threads.

JS-Kit isn’t often collectively bundled with the Disqus, Sezwho and Intense Debate as its commenting tools are offered along side a range of other inline blogging tools, including polls, ratings (placing it against Outbrain) and some in-blog referral tools. The move to acquire Haloscan would seeminly indicate that JS-Kit is getting more serious about its commenting platform at a time the 2.0 commenting market is heating up.

Venturebeat (also source on the news here) reports that JS-Kit took the opportunity to trash talk Disqus, saying that “Disqus hosts comments on its own servers and site and in so doing, takes away all the benefits that comments could have on a blog’s search engine ranking.” While Disqus does hosts comments on its own servers, comments can be seen in search engines when users use the API based plugin, one of the biggest selling points for me when I decided to go with Disqus to power comments on this blog.

But why the need for trash talk at all? Isn’t one of the 2.0 fundamentals that we can all get along?

I know when I considered joining a 2.0 comment service that one of the things that impressed me immensely (and it still does) about Disqus was not only Disqus founder Daniel Ha’s commitment to reaching out to me during the consideration process, but also his ability to respond to my concerns with positive responses about his own product without the need to belittle competing products in the process. I’ve also seen Daniel respond continually when criticism has arisen by embracing the criticism and challenging himself (and Disqus) to do better. The product isn’t perfect, and yes, there is always room for improvement, but Disqus continues to grow for the better, while being trasnsparent, open and friendly in the broader space. I can even remember Sezwho trash talking Disqus, and Daniel responded with an open invite to Sezwho on possible interoperability and never once denigrated Sezwho in return (that I’m aware of).

As competition between personal services in this space continues, and when the feature set from one service to the next is fairly close, I know I’m more likely to consider a service provider when and where they are positive players in the space, selling the merits of their service based on their service, without trash talking others. This may not always be the case (particularly for large, non-blog related services), but if I’m putting a service on a blog I own, it’s something that makes a great selling point for me, and as I talk to others, I hear similar positions as well.

JS-Kit

Intense Debate Ups Comment Ante With FriendFeed Support

Duncan Riley — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:52:20 +0000

Plugin blog commenting provider Intense Debate has announced inline support for FriendFeed comments.

With the new feature, Intense Debate users select FriendFeed from the control panel, enter their FriendFeed account details, and FriendFeed comments are then automatically included in the comment thread on their blog. Intense Debate notes though that as FriendFeed doesn’t support comment threading the comments won’t be threaded as such, but they will appear as part of the overall comment thread (and presumably local responses are threaded beneath FriendFeed comments in case of Intense Debate generated replies).

Intense Debate beats its main competitors Disqus and Sezwho in offering FriendFeed support, although many bloggers have been able to show FriendFeed comments on posts, but in a stand alone capacity (you’ll see it on this post…eventually).

One word for the announcement: great. I don’t use Intense Debate (I’m a Disqus user) but the ongoing feature arms race between the various platforms is creating better, more appealing products for end users and blog owners, and that’s good for blogging 2.0. The only remaining questions: who will offer FriendFeed support next, then what’s the next great feature one of the three will come up with.

(via Louis Gray)

Switching To Blogging 2.0

Duncan Riley — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 05:05:14 +0000

The business of blogging is changing. A movement that arguably spawned social media and widespread user generated content is no longer ignoring the web 2.0 changes that have followed its rise. Open and sharing have replaced closed and walled, and a new generation that knows nothing other than cross-network platform agnostic networking expects that the sites they visit will embrace 2.0, not ignore it.

I’ve already covered a number of aspects relating to Blogging 2.0 (the user | professional blogging | advertising) but a recurring theme I’ve seen, both through emails received, comment threads and discussions elsewhere, is that people perhaps don’t yet know the best ways to embrace the new paradigm of blogging. Here’s what I’d recommend for blog owners.

Please note that the focus is on a blog owners viewpoint while looking at blogging 2.0 in terms of promotion and value adding for a site, so my apologies in advance if the traffic implications and marketing angles upset anyone as I’m not exploring the end user benefits here. Ultimately these recommendations are great for readers/ end users as well, and as I’ve argued previously, blogging 2.0 can be a win/ win for everyone involved.

Comments

Locally hosted walled comment services on blogs are dying. Users are expecting common standards, enhanced layout and unified tracking when visiting blogs. Services such as Disqus and Sezwho deliver this functionality.

There are a number of advantages: these services filter spam, offer user profiles and centralized tracking services, and enhance the comment layout on your blog. They’re all great benefits, but the number one reason you should make the switch: using these services increases the number of comments you get on your blog. Likewise not using them may drive conversations elsewhere. I know personally I’m far more likely to comment on a blog running Disqus now than one without, and it’s a common thing I hear now. Think of it in these terms: a Disqus user is already logged in so doesn’t have to enter personal details to make a comment, ie: the barrier to entry for commenting is lower. They can also track responses from a common page so are more likely to make repeat comments on a post than would otherwise be the case.

The tried and failed argument against these sorts of services is you lose control of your comments and that the search engines can’t see them. This simply isn’t the case. Sezwho hosts the comments locally. Disqus does host the comments on a central server but if you use the API wordpress plugin they can be seen on your site by search engines. Further you can pull your comments out of Disqus at any time and import them back into WordPress.

All up if you’re still thinking about it, you have a lot to gain by trying one of these services, and very little (if anything) to lose.

Twitter

Everyone accepts RSS, but are you offering your latest blog posts via Twitter? There are two options, you can post your latest posts to Twitter using your personal account (and I do for my personal blogs) or you can set up a dedicated account for your site that allows people who are interested to subscribe to receive the latest updates (which is what I do for The Inquisitr). If you’re not producing a lot of content you can do this manually, or there’s a Twitter plugin for WordPress that will do it all for you.

Take it as a given that you should also be engaging on Twitter as well, as opposed to simply spamming it with your links. Most people will happily accept the occasional link via a personal account, but over do it and you’ll lose followers. Some times it’s best to keep things separate and give people a choice.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed has become a little controversial in some blogging circles with accusations that the site steals conversations from blogs. But I simply ask in return: if this is the case, wouldn’t the same be true of Digg or Reddit, who also have conversations around links to stories on external sites?

Whether you love FriendFeed or hate it, there is one certainty: you can’t stop conversations from occurring there. You can chose to ignore it, but others aren’t, and if numbers are you goal in blogging, your rivals may well be embracing FriendFeed and benefiting from it.

Like Twitter, participation yourself is important, however the lines between self promotion and conversation are blurred as FriendFeed pulls data in from across various services, including your blog. Still, this function is only ever as good as people following you, so being an active and good member (like Twitter) will increase the number of people following you, and potentially the traffic you get from the site. I’ve found that FriendFeed is constantly in the Top 10 referrers list for The Inquisitr for example.

The other way you can embrace FriendFeed is by incorporating FriendFeed actions on your site as I have here at The Inquisitr (if you’re on the full post page you’ll see FriendFeed at the bottom about 15 minutes after this goes live). Glenn Slaven’s excellent FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin is highly recommended. The conversation is going to take place with or without you, why not embrace it and make it part of your site as well?

Widgets

Did you know we have widgets for The Inquisitr and they didn’t cost us a cent? The Inquisitr widget to the right was designed in SproutBuilder, arguably the most friendly online widget building platforms there is. If you can write a Word document, you can use this.

The idea with widgets is similar to Twitter and FriendFeed above: you want to give your users as many subscription opportunities as possible (remember Blogging 2.0 is ultimately all about the user). Widgets like this one can be embedded in iGoogle and Netvibes, used on social networking profiles and if your readers are really included can be embedded on their site as well.

I’d recommend giving SproutBuilder a shot, and also take a look at WidgetBox as well.

TypePad AntiSpam Is Welcomed, But Times Are Changing

Duncan Riley — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:27:02 +0000

SixApart has launched a full scale assault on Automattic’s Akismet spam service with the launch of TypePad AntiSpam.

Michael at TechCrunch notes that TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs and in his testing was superior to Akismet. Mollom is another new service in this space (I covered it for TechCrunch in April).

The two great features about TypePad AntiSpam: it’s open source and it has a killer price: free, unlike the closed source and pay for serious use Akismet. It’s also available for WordPress blogs as well as those powered by SixApart products, immediately delivering SixApart a huge potential market.

It’s great to see competition in antispam products, and it has been long overdue, but times are changing. We are seeing a move away from local comment hosting to services such as Disqus, Sezwho and others, outsourcing spam management along with comment management to other companies. The numbers on paper may be small so far, but the trend away from local comment management is on, and even sites such as Venturebeat are now using Disqus. Notably both Sezwho and Disqus are using Akismet for spam filtering.

So where does this leave Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam? There will always be a corporate need for antispam tools, and ultimately this is where the potential profits in service provision rest. Some bloggers will remain using local commenting systems and they’ll need services like these, however expect those numbers to become a minority within 2-3 years.