14 DAY TRIAL // Following a very short private beta period, JS-Kit has announced that its new blog commenting platform Echo is now available for the general public. It aims to solve one of the common issues with comments across various blogging platforms, the fact that, for the most part, they're isolated. Echo brings a way to coagulate all of the comments surrounding a blog post from all sites and services like Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed. It isn't the first product of this type but it does bring unique advantages.
“We are proud to announce that Echo is now available to the general public as a Public Beta. After launching our private beta sites TechcrunchIT, Building43, Guy Kawasaki, Inquistr, BrianSolis, LearnToDuck and LaLaWag we feel ready to make Echo available to the rest of the world,” JS-Kit's Chris Saad wrote. “Echo is the way to share your content, and watch the live reaction.“
Installing the new platform is straightforward; it provides embed plugins for WordPress and Blogger, as well as general script code for other platforms or custom solutions. Echo brings a lot of new features but not all of them are available in the free version.
Echo Core, the free offering, gets Twitter and Facebook integration, nested replies, moderation tools, spam and obscenity filtering, as well as other features. This allows commenters to use their accounts from a number of services, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID etc., to post the comment but also to distribute it to the other platforms.
However, some of the best features aren't included in the free version, most notably real-time updates and the aggregation one that adds comments left on other sites or services to the original post, and are only available in the paid Echo Live, which would set users back $98 per year. Echo also comes in two other flavors catered at larger organizations with Echo Pro and the OEM and Enterprise offering.