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Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead

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Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead
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Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead

by Guest Author on August 27, 2009

This is a guest post by Nicolas Holzapfel of stealth mode startup Yoomoot . Throughout the summer we’re running guest posts we like - exclusive to TechCrunch Europe - written by people on the tech scene in Europe. If you’d like to contribute get in touch .

Widget developer JS-Kit recently proclaimed the “death of comments” . How so? By way of its innovative comment management system Echo, that’s how. This would-be executioner pulls together disparate comments across the Web about a particular article and places them amid the conventional comments below the article. If it takes off, popular sites like TechCrunch could end up with hundreds if not thousands of additional comments. And therein lies the problem. How many of us can be bothered to read through more than the first few dozen or so comments on an article?

Not more than a handful I’m sure; a handful that won’t be made any bigger by Echo’s invading army of snippets from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg and Delicious. It may be nice for the article’s author to conveniently track every last mention of his or her article, but for the reader it just means hundreds more comments to not-read.

That’s not to say that ...

Original URL
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/08/27/echo-won%E2%80%99t-kill-comments-%E2%80%94-they%E2%80%99re-already-dead/

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    • Nova Spivack Nova Spivack
      3 months ago


      Really insightful article, especially the last points. I agree we need a better way to have "mass conversations." That's a really interesting suggestion.
      Artificial Intelligence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Collective Intelligence, Web Industry Trends, The Future of the Web, Nova Spivack - My Public Twine, The Global Brain, Microblogs, Social Networking - Trends and Technologies, Social Media

      • Roger Macdonald
        3 months ago


        In answer to the author's call: "We need something that allows massive numbers of comments to be navigated quickly and easily so that coherent mass conversations can emerge."
        It would seem semantic interpolations of massive comment fields could reveal strong associative matching and offer varieties of reader-selected perspectives hinging on any set of semantic entity attributes. The larger the data set, the more meaningful facets might be called. I can imagine extractions well beyond the currently popular "sentiment" to include political slant, editorial perspective, outlier viewpoints, and even issue coherence evolution (over time).
        Artificial Intelligence
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