I have been following JS-Kit since their early days when they simply offered a drop in comments and rating system for sites that didn't already have those sorts of features. I haven't used the service because all the platforms (WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type, Blogger) I work with to build communities offer good comments and ratings either via core functionality or add-ons. Times have changed and "good" comment functionality may not be good enough if you're serious about building community and capturing the breadth of discussion related to your content. JS-Kit has announced the beta of a new service called Echo that aims to provide much better comment functionality for the web as it exists today.

There was a time when your comment form for a post asked for name, email and website link as a way to establish the identity of an individual. Times have changed. Spam has become more prevalent in comments and we also have a multitude of new ways to register identity on the web. Gravatar, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect and others allow people to port their identity to different websites as long as those websites support the various identity services. The key phrase in that last sentence is "as long as..." If website owners want to continue to offer the richest experience to their visitors they they need to keep up with the latest services that offer web identities. They also need to know which services are popular enough to warrant integration in their websites. And finally there needs to be a reasonably simple way for site owners to integrate with their chosen platform. It's a lot to stay informed about.

The way content, and the conversation about content, spreads has changed as well. There was a time when people wrote their own post and linked back to the original post (trackbacks) or they saved a link to their account on Delicious. Now people link to and discuss content in a wide variety of places. Links find their way to Digg, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google Reader and other popular web destinations. Conversation also occurs in those places as well. If you started the conversation it might be nice to know that it's happening and share it with the other visitors to your site. There's also the issue of content and influence as currency. If you publish content that attracts many people you probably want others who are interested in you to know how much discussion occurs around your content. And perhaps the level of discussion you generate will help to make someone more interested in what you're publishing.

Given this new reality of conversation around web content, JS-Kit is offering a simpler solution for website owners with their Echo plaftorm. Echo allows users who are commenting to register their identity using a variety of the most popular services. Beyond registering their identity this feature also allows the visitor to simultaneously share their contribution on those other services as well. That's a feature that can help expose the discussion (for better or worse) to a new group of people.

Echo also offers a pretty simple way for visitors to continue to follow the conversation via email and RSS.

Those features make Echo very good and provide functionality that is similar to other custom comment solutions such as IntenseDebate and Disqus. Other promised features that make this service sound exciting are the real-time updates and capture from different sources around the web. Echo promises to update the comment portion of your content as new feedback rolls in. This turns the comments into something like a chat room. There's also the promise of aggregation. Echo will capture discussion and links from various places on the web and bring it back into the comment stream on your site.

On the first glance the Echo service by JS-Kit appears to be able to solve some real problems for people who want robust conversation around their web content. It also solves an identity problem. I don't want people to have to sign up for my websites to comment. But I would like to know who they are and give them the convenience of using the service that they like the most. The platform looks promising but the devil is in the details. Solid performance is key. It's a disaster when you add something like this to your website and it fails to perform. It can slow the loading of your site and kill the conversation that it aimed to enhance. If JS-Kit does come through with solid performance then Echo could change the way that website owner manage their comments and community.