What’s new?

Each item will now have a ‘Like’ button. Users can click it to express their support of the comment. The changes are displayed in real-time.

What’s novel?

Unlike normal ‘Likes’ where a counter may simply increment by 1 (E.g. 5 people liked this) we have taken a page from the best social platforms on the web and made ‘liking’ more social. We will actually display the names and faces of the people who liked a given item right underneath the post.

There are a number of important advantages of actually displaying the names and faces of the people ‘liking’ an item. They include…

1. Liking an item puts a user’s social capital/reputation on the line.
2. Users can see who liked their comment and respond with a reply (driving more engagement).
3. Liking an item is now almost as effective as commenting on an item in terms of displaying article engagement (for publishers) and delivering an ego boost (for users).

We expect that this will drive up engagement and time spent on the page as well as, over time, help us find the most high value content for better sorting/filtering.

Try it live below in the Echo thread!

As always, we appreciate feedback.

From ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

The development team has shipped some great polish to the product to make sure every pixel and feature works exactly as expected every time. We continue to believe that a focus on robustness and user experience will lead to a product people love to use. We’d love to hear your feedback!

Highlights

End users

• Cleanup of some visual noise
  In an effort to optimize the look and feel of Echo, we have made some small tweaks to reduce the visual noise of the item stream. These include:

Replies now have half-sized avatars

Reply/Flag/Moderate controls and Via tags are now grayed out until the user hovers over them

• Unbinding identities
  Users now have the ability to unbind identities from their user account right from in ‘From’ menu.

Admins

• For admin users. IP addresses are now displayed in the Echo stream right alongside user names

Pro Customers

• Pro customers can now choose to modify email notification templates and have emails come from their own domains.
• A new and improved implementation of External Profile Binding has been rolled out making integration with 3rd party publisher logins easier and more powerful than ever.

Other updates…

The boys at Nerd Stalker were kind enough to ask me a bunch of great questions about Echo at SFNewTech. Here’s the result.

Nielsen recently released a report stating that time spent on Social Networking sites in the US a tripled in August from the same month last year.

This is hardly a surprise. We are social beings. We are optimized to look for, recognize and gravitate towards faces. We like to tell each other stories and view the world through the lens of like minded individuals.

Social Networking sites have captured our imaginations by observing and capitalizing on these trends.

How can news sites, applications and other web properties that are not traditionally thought of as social networks compete in such a marketplace?

The answer is not to create your own social network. There are already plenty of those out there. You don’t need your own login, and you certainly don’t want to outsource your social user experience to yet another social networking destination site.

The answer is to make your site a first class extension of the existing social networking destination sites. You want users of major social networks to be able to swarm to your site, have a great experience with their friends and other users, and leave just as easily. You want them to feel that visiting your site is just another click along their social journey – not yet another place where they need to create a profile and claim stuff.

You need to borrow and steal all the best lessons that the social networks teach us. Faces should be attached to everything. Friends are the filter. Login is one click. Sharing is caring. Social gestures are just as important as comments and content – even more so. Real-time makes things fun and dynamic.

These are the things we have focused on when building and refining Echo. We think of Echo as a pipe that helps users bridge from the social networks to your site. To help them interact with their friends using the profiles and metaphors they already understand. To help them share with their friends and to help them come back at any time.

The result, one of our customers reports (Building43.com) is an average of a 3x increase in time spent.

We will continue to learn from the best Social Networking features and bring those experiences to your site through Echo.

Echo is not a commenting service and it is most certainly not a funnel to a new social networking destination site. It is a realtime lifestream for your content that encourages and surfaces engagement with your content from across the web. It lives on your page and enables social networking users to visit and bring their friends.

(via GigaOm)

Here are the official details from Layer42.

Affected Customers: Multiple
Issue Severity: Critical
Date of incident: 09/22/2009
Start of Incident: 05:58AM PDT
End of Incident: 06:42AM PDT
Total Outage Time: 44 Minutes

Incident Description:

At approximately 05:58AM on September 22nd, 2009, there was a power event which caused a fault in one of our UPS modules and System Bypass Module. The failed UPS caused a cascading effect on the remaining UPS systems as well as upstream toward utility power and generator system, resulting in critical power drop.

Impact Description:

AC Power to data center floor was lost.

Root Cause:

Currently under investigation.

Actions Taken:

1. The UPS manufacturer is currently on site investigating the issue. All UPS systems and related power systems will be inspected.

2. The power system is currently running on bypass, pending a thorough inspection of the UPS system. We will send a status update before moving customer power back to UPS.

3. A full RFO will be issued pending the completion of our ongoing investigation.

While a large part of our infrastructure is already on Amazon Web Services, we are working to migrate the rest over as soon as appropriate. This will ensure that no single colocation provider is a point of failure.

Kirill Korinskiy

Engineer
Kirill has designed and developed high performance ad-software for a Russian Yahoo-like portal, analytics system for the UK Federal Agency and an internal map-based collaboration application for Brazilian geologists. Kirill is also an active open source commiter, contributer and developer.
.

Anna Shtraus

Technical Support
Anna has a Master’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science and continues post-graduate studies for a PhD degree in probability theory. She has several years of experience in web applications development and customer support for e-commerce software. She is a technical support engineer at JS-Kit.

They have both already made their presence known as part of the dev and support teams. You can even chat with Anna over on our support forum.

If you think you can contribute something to JS-Kit, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line. You can see the rest of our team on the wiki.

Introducing Echo from JS-Kit on Vimeo.

Got mad video skillz? We’d love to see what you can come up! We will feature video trailers made by the community here on the blog, on Twitter and soon on our home page.

Here’s the full story…

FriendFeed Login and Sharing

As you have probably realized by now, Echo Profiles are not about creating yet another login, trying to create yet another social network at JS-Kit.com or just adding badges to your profile. It’s about authenticating against the services that matter to you, binding them together and ultimately using them to perform key social activities with the people that matter to you on the social networks they already hang out on.

Our FriendFeed Integration is a natural extension to the long list of existing logins we currently support. And we won’t stop here.

With this new addition, you can log in with FriendFeed, bind it with your other accounts and share your comment straight to FriendFeed.

Login with FriendFeed

Sharing with FriendFeed

For a full demo/screencast of how login and sharing works with Echo, please check out these screencasts.

Comments in a Popup

Today we also shipped the option for publishers to have their Echo stream appear in a popup window instead of embedded on the page.

If this option is selected, a comment counter will appear at the bottom of your post (instead of the full Comment form and Echo Stream). Users can then click on the link to launch a separate, smaller browser window that they might keep on a second monitor to monitor the real-time conversation.

Other updates from the last month

Echo was born in this spirit.

The incredible wave of positive attention towards Echo, its explosive growth, and rapid adoption by tier one publishers &  bloggers shows that we hit the mark.  As Robert Scoble said of Echo, “Blogging is back!”

Our innovations of hyper-distribution, binding multiple social identities together, re-assembly of the global conversation, all housed in a real-time architecture, do come with costs.  These costs come in the form of changes that impact customers of our legacy Comment, Ratings, & Polls services.

Today we are announcing the end-of-life of our “Wire Frame” and “Smooth Grey” skin for Comments and the discontinuation of our Ratings & Polls services.  All Comment customers will automatically be upgraded to the Echo skin.  All settings, administrative controls, and the comments themselves are inherited by Echo.

One can reasonably ask “What’s the big deal with keeping a few old templates around?  They look and work great!”, or, “Why would one of the world’s top Ratings companies kill its service?”

The answers are optimization & focus.

A major issue is the Fibonacci-esq need to test and support each new feature against outdated skins.  Strategically, these costs would sap our ability to innovate and would ultimately become an ever increasing weight on the company that would exhaust our resources.  More practically, the skins do not support our newest innovations.

Echo heralded the “Death of Comments” because it completely supplanted its functionality and addressed the current state of the market by bringing into balance engagement between publishers and social networks.  As its heavy sword severed the head of Comments its momentum, unfortunately, carried through to the heart of Ratings and Polls.

By this metaphor I mean that a young company can ride only one really big wave and, for us, that wave is Echo.  We believe these decisions will benefit publishers and their visitor immediately from our deep thought and broad experience in optimizing the engagement experience and for the long haul as 100% of the companies resources are laser focused on improving Echo.

For customers that are impacted by these decisions we offer:

• 90 day continuation of the Ratings & Polls services so existing customers can access their data and find a suitable alternative (11/15/2009)
• 90 day continuation of Wire Frame & Smooth Grey so existing customers can prepare for the upgrade (11/15/2009)
• For prepaid subscriptions: 100% refund of the remainder of the subscription for customers that do not wish to upgrade
• Support for sites that need assistance upgrading
• Echo colors & fonts are fully customizable using a new and improved CSS class structure

We appreciate the patience and support our customers and are extremely excited by the possibilities that Echo presents to us all!

Khris Loux, Co-Founder & CEO
@khrisloux