View the full documentary below:

Day 1: A Social TV Documentary from André-Pierre du Plessis on Vimeo.

Echo has added DiscussIt Moderator, an application that enables publishers to moderate real-time conversations across multiple applications and websites, to the growing list of partners in the Echo App Ecosystem. Designed for high-volume environments, the web-based app allows moderation teams to collaborate in real-time, solving a major issue for web publishers. DiscussIt Moderator is centralized and augments Echo StreamServer’s standard moderation features, including bad word filtering, spam detection and community flagging. With it, teams are empowered to co-moderate real-time content from any Echo Enabled application – including Comments, Forums, Media Galleries, Lifestreams and Social Chatter – through a single interface.

“Echo solves a key interoperability issue that has plagued web publishers since the beginnings of social media,” said Charlie Brook, Technical Architect from DiscussIt. “With the Echo Platform, businesses can create seamless user experiences that leverage apps from a number of different providers, all of which interoperate at the data level. This unique model provides website publishers with more flexibility and choice, and enables streamlined workflows across multiple apps. We are excited to be a part of their app marketplace.”

DiscussIt Moderator uses configurable rules to automatically flag questionable content for review and then flows that content into a live message stream. That stream can be split into sub-streams so that individual moderators can collaborate on different content sections simultaneously. Moderators can approve, deny or respond directly to items through the user interface as well as edit existing items, which enables them to remove inappropriate content from otherwise valuable comments and posts.

“As major brands look to increase brand engagement through real-time technology, moderating that real-time content effectively can be a major challenge,” says Khris Loux, our co-founder and CEO. “This challenge is compounded by the scale and complexity of most digital programs. DiscussIt addresses this issue head on, with a robust application capable of meeting the needs of our demanding enterprise customers.”

Overview Video:

DiscussIT Moderator: Overview and Screenshots

In the news:

Venture Beat:  Echo’s New DiscussIt App Simplifies Moderation for Big Media Companies

Website Magazine:  Echo Helps Publishers Wrestling with Real-Time Content Moderation

Media Post:  Echo Offers Live Moderation of Web Conversations

USA Network delivered surprises for fans — and big TV and social ratings for their long-running hit show ‘PSYCH’ — as part of the ‘PSYCH 100′ celebration last night.  Echo partnered with USA Network to deliver a live, multi-platform voting experience for fans that let them pick the ending in real-time.  Live results displayed on-air to viewers as the show cut to commercial breaks throughout the episode.

Highlights:

• Over 150,000 votes from East Coast and West Coast airings, with over 100,000 votes occurring on USA Network platforms
• East Coast and West Coast audiences picked DIFFERENT endings
• PSYCH ranked as the #1 ranked entertainment scripted show on social for the day (Source: Trendrr.tv)
• The  episode of PSYCH ranked as the #1 scripted original on cable in all demos
• Deep  advertiser integration across platforms with Dunkin’ Donuts, down to the #psychWhoDDit hashtag usage

Echo powered the live voting experience across TV, Web and Mobile platforms for PSYCH 100, in addition to powering the live Character Chatter experience across all USA Network Shows.  USA Network and Echo recently participated in the ‘Death of the Couch Potato: The Future of Social TV‘ panel at SXSW.

Media Coverage:

• ‘Psych’: Guest star Christopher Lloyd talks the ‘Clue’-inspired 100th episode
• Psych 100 Clues Set Visit: Reuniting Christopher Lloyd, Lesley Ann Warren and Martin Mull
• ‘Psych’s’ 100th episode: Vote on the ‘Clue’-themed episode ending
• The 100th Episode of “Psych” on USA Network Was the #1 Scripted Cable Original During Wednesday Primetime Across All Demos

PSYCH Web Voting:

Vine from USA Network’s SVP Jesse Redniss, outlining this truly cross-platform approach:

And now! The Fan Voted Ending #psychwhoddit #secondscreen @dunkindonuts vine.co/v/bjnlBOWjMqq

— Jesse Redniss (@jesseredniss) March 28, 2013

With 166k social actions #psych100 the #1 Scripted Original show on TV last night according to @trendrr. #psychos rocked the#secondscreen

— Jesse Redniss (@jesseredniss) March 28, 2013

Original PSYCH 100 Promo Video:

Promo on Twitter:

The web has changed from a collection of hyperlinked pages into a set of real-time, social applications connected with Streams.

At Echo, we’ve built and continue to innovate on the worlds first and largest collection of cloud services designed to power this real-time, social revolution. On top of these powerful services, we also provide a JavaScript SDK to help app developers build and deploy great apps quickly and easily.

Collectively this world class app development platform already powers over 30 Billion API calls a month for platinum customers like the Washington Post, Universal Music Group, NASDAQ, NBC Universal, ESPN, ABC and independent software vendors like Chute, Realtidbits, IdeaMelt, StreamSentiment and DiscussIT.v

Today, we are releasing the next major version of the Echo JavaScript SDK, “JS SDK 3.0”.

This completely rebuilt version is designed to help developers build better apps more quickly by taking care of a range of distracting challenges that slow them down or get in the way.

Using the SDK, the next generation of apps like real-time comments, real-time forums, social TV, media galleries and even the next Twitter, Quora or Foursquare can be built for a fraction of the time and money.

This is possible because the SDK solves a number of key challenges for web app developers including…

• JS API – Easy access to server-side APIs via the client side
• GUI Library – Consistent look and feel between apps (Bootstrap)
• UI Controls – A core set of UI Controls for common app/interaction patterns
• Component Manifest – Consistent app architecture for plugin extensibility, consistent configuration handling and app interoperability
• Echo Loader – Simplified dependency loading to reduce script conflicts and redundancies

Realtidbits Comments: Pilot App

All Echo Enabled Apps in the Echo Marketplace are now transitioning to this new SDK.

The first app to make the move is Realtidbits Comments.

Kelly Abbott, Realtidbits CEO loves the new SDK “If I can dream it, I can build it. Echo’s SDK 3.0 is a world class development toolkit! The standards based approach to UI framework means I can concentrate on building features and functionality, not vanity. In business terms, I can build rapidly as it supports our agile development approach. You’d be amazed at what we can do now in a few hours.”

To coincide with the SDK 3.0 release, Realtidbits is releasing the all new ‘Comments 3.0’ featuring a beautiful new skin, tons of amazing new features and deep support for the SDK 3.0 plugin and app architecture.

More info found here: http://aboutecho.com/Apps/RealtimeConversation/RealtidbitsComments

More Details about the Echo SDK…

JS API – Easy access to server-side APIs via the client side
A well documented client-side API for interacting with the Echo Cloud Services quickly and easily right from the page using Javascript.

GUI Library – Consistent look and feel between apps
Echo JS SDK 3.0 uses Twitter Bootstrap as the new UI framework. By employing an industry-standard UI framework with well defined UI rules, should help the apps look stylish and consistent, yet provide a lot of room for customizations by our publishers.

UI Controls – A core set of Controls for common app/interaction patterns
Included in the SDK is a set of controls to quickly deliver core pieces of App UI based on common feature scenarios such as activity streams, submission, facepiles, counters and more.

Component Manifest – Consistent app architecture for plugin extensibility, consistent configuration handling and app interoperability
In order to ensure consistency between various components built by different developers, we have introduced a Component Manifest which describes the core attributes of the given component, such as templates, renderers, events, dependencies etc.

Components built using this approach inherit a number of distinct advantages including:

• Better app consistency and interoperability. Multiple apps can be deployed on the same page (or combined together) without script conflicts and errors.
• Supports for plugins that can modify the given component’s behavior.

Echo Loader – Simplified dependency loading to reduce script conflicts and redundancies
In order to minimize the footprint of JavaScript files on a given page (particularly important for SEO and mobile web) and avoid script conflicts the JS SDK provides a class which contains the logic for downloading appropriate JS and CSS dependencies (as described in the Component Manifest) on the fly.

Other SDK Features

Built in Minification
All SDK files are served from our CDN minified by default, which reduces the size of the scripts by 25-85% of the original versions (min+gzip compared to dev+gzip). Non-minified versions of the files are also provided to simplify the development and debug process.

More fault tolerant jQuery support
One of the common issues faced JS App Development is jQuery incompatibility. Different versions of jQuery software located on the same page would sometimes cause conflicts, bugs and other problems. In SDK 3.0 we’ve introduced a dedicated namespace for jQuery and isolated it from accidental overrides.

Open source code available on GitHub
The SDK code is open source (located on GitHub). We look forward to having the community monitor and participate in SDK development moving forward.

The GitHub repo can be found here: https://github.com/EchoAppsTeam/js-sdk/

Extensive test suites
100% of the public interfaces are covered with automated tests (over 1k and counting), which should increase quality and predictability moving forward.

Test Suites can be found here: http://echoappsteam.github.com/js-sdk/tests/

Extensive documentation
Inline documentation for all public functions using JSDuck is included. We have also added several guides and tutorials and are planning to extend the SDK knowledge base moving forward.

Documentation can be found here: http://echoappsteam.github.com/js-sdk/docs/

Get Started

Check out the documentation on GitHub.

To get started with the SDK contact us!

Further coverage:

1. Pando Daily: Echo launches its SDK, invites developers to build real time tools for ESPN and others
2. The Next Web:  Echo unveils its JavaScript SDK to help developers create social apps for TV, music, news, and more

Video streaming by Ustream

Echo and WWE SXSW Panel Highlights: How WWE Crushed Social TV

Highlights from ‘Death of the Couch Potato: The Future of Social TV’ panel

Robert Scoble Interview with Echo’s Khris Loux and Chris Saad

Business as an API: Video Highlights from the Villa Austin

Backplane and Beer with Echo and JanRain

Photo and Video Coverage:

Photo Highlights:

Death of the Couch Potato: The Future of Social TV

Moderator:

Jason Hoch, SVP Customer Strategy, Echo

Panelists:

Jesse Redniss, SVP Digital, USA Network

David Beck, Head of Social, Univision

Hermione Way, Silicon Valley Video Director

Full Photo Highlights

Live Photo Stream from the Show

Video Interview Link

Watch live video from Rackspace TV on Justin.tv

Host:

Robert Scoble

From Echo:

Khris Loux, CEO and Co-founder

Chris Saad, Chief of Strategy and Co-founder

One of the highlights from Villa Austin gathered thought leaders in the industry to discuss the concept of ‘Business as an API‘

Video streaming by Ustream

Link to archived video (start 2:00 minutes in)

Panel Attendees:

Khris Loux, CEO and Co-Founder,  Echo

Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon

Kitric Kerns, VP of Product, CNN.com

Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery

Perkins Miller, EVP of Digital, WWE