Testing JS-Kit

by Scott Jangro on 02 August 2009

478552A5-DB76-49F1-8701-311EF0308AC4.jpgTo complete the third leg of the comment system triathalon, I must test out JS-Kit. If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ve been through Disqus, Intense Debate, and of course regular Wordpress comments.

And now, I’m finally testing out JS-Kit’s comment system since they just launched their new ECHO product.

I also thought I’d go bare-bones on the theme for a while and back off to using Thesis for a while. I’ll customize it up a bit, bit I’m enjoying the blank canvas. I digress.

The promise of ECHO

ECHO has been touted as the “death of comments” by JS-Kit’s CEO Khris Loux. His vision of how comments should work is that conversations happen all over the Internet, not just on a single blog post. People talk about blog posts everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. ECHO promises to pull all these discussions back into the blog post in real time.

This is a vision that I’ve shared for several years now, which is why I created BUMPzee back in 2007. I didn’t have the time or funding to run with that project, and this is a different approach to the same idea, but I’m still on my endless quest for the perfect blog comment solution: get more people talking about blog posts, no matter where.

Notable Features

There are a few notable changes that this comment system brings.

First, it’s Javascript-only. This was my major criticism of blog comment systems over the years as that keeps the comments out of the eyes of the search engines and the blog-owner loses the SEO benefit.

I decided to get over this particular hang up that I have.

Second, since ECHO allows authentication using a variety of services:

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There’s really no excuse for someone to not be able to authenticate through one of those. I tested a few of these. Some work better than others. Hopefully this will put a big damper on the spammers.

Feel free to give it a try here. Comment away!

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  • I think Echo for commenting is very cool.
  • Shawn Collins
    That's a shame on the FB part - I have my RSS pushed to Notes in FB, too, and it would be great to bridge the comments there with my blog.
  • Scott Jangro
    You can see on my most recent post how Echo is pulling in mentions on twitter and other places.  Pretty cool, though a little redundant.  I can delete some of those if I want.  Unfortunately, it cannot pull in discussions from Facebook.  There's a great discussion going on there: http://bit.ly/1Q552G
  • Shawn Collins
    Cool - thanks. I see Live is $12/year - I was thinking of getting it for a half dozen or so sites. Maybe I'll try it on one and see how it goes.
  • Scott Jangro
    Correction, this is Echo Live not pro.
  • Scott Jangro
    I'm happy enough with it so far, though I took a serious break from writing much here this summer.  I'm hoping to get more active and will be able to form more of an opinion.

    This is Echo Pro, I believe.
  • Shawn Collins
    So you're still using it a month later - does that mean you've decided this is the best solution?

    I want to move on from basic WP comments.

    Is this Echo Live, Pro or Partner?
  • Troy McConaghy
    I was searching to see if anyone had a WordPress blog using both the Thesis WordPress Theme and JS-Kit ECHO. This post came up. My search is over.
  • Uday
    I love the "pulling in of all discussions" feature of JS-Kit Echo.
  • Katty
    Test #2. By the way, Chris Saad, your link to js-kit does not work as of 8/14/2009. Cheers Katty
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