Decentralization has meant many services now let you follow a whole range of feed content and often times comment on it. The problem? That conversation is wrapped around that particular service and not around the original content.
On the 20th of March ReadWriteWeb stated The conversation Has Left the Blogosphere and only yestarday Loic Le Meur repeated the same desire of getting the conversation back to his blog.
We have been quietly building a platform for joining-the-dots of comments around the blogosphere. And today we announce (and very soon launch) a version of fav.or.it that makes it second nature to have a conversation that is centralized back around the blog.
Conversation Tracker
fav.or.it now as part of it’s core interface has a ‘conversation tracker’ that realtime shows what posts you have commented upon before and now have replies that you may want to respond to. It is a simple matter of a single click to see the replies and then reply back again.
Why is this so important? The conversation happens ‘On the blog’ – fav.or.it is unique that all the comments that our users post go back to the source of the original content.
The video below demonstrates how it all works in practice.
API
We recently announced an API that allowed access to a limited set of abilities that leveraged the fav.or.it core framework of sending comments to blogs. The second phase of the API will soon be launched that allows any external service to make use of our conversation tracking and in conjunction with the current abilities allow users to take part in the global blog conversation from any application or website.
Features and Release
The conversation tracker for beta users on Wednesday morning (UK time).
In this update are a whole load more, in fact more than I could cover in this post but here is a quick bullet point list of the major changes.
- New Subscription Interface (pictured in video)
- Integration with FriendFeed (to share items)
- All new import system (much simpler)
This is exciting news Nick. I’ve been watching and enjoying fav.or.it for a while and this is certainly setting the standard in feed reader functionality. Great work!
[...] blogs you read – not just those using Disqus or a similar product. Additionally, as the company indicates in a blog post, there will soon be an API for the conversation tracker so that any external service can make use [...]
[...] blogs you read – not just those using Disqus or a similar product. Additionally, as the company indicates in a blog post, there will soon be an API for the conversation tracker so that any external service can make use [...]
[...] blogs you read – not just those using Disqus or a similar product. Additionally, as the company indicates in a blog post, there will soon be an API for the conversation tracker so that any external service can make use [...]
[...] the RSS reader and commenting aggregator in private beta, has launched what it calls a “conversation tracker,” which aggregates all your comments from around the web [...]
How will the system handle various spam plugins, such as Spam Karma which checks for time spent on site?
p.s. thanks for pulling my previous pingback out of Akismet – false positives are a pain, especially when you see a scraper still listed.
[...] Conversation Tracker [...]
[...] as Nick Halstead has posted on the fav.or.it blog that the next incarnation of the service is "Giving the conversation back to the blog" – well worth checking out. Of course, this next step still relies on using a compatible [...]
[...] To demonstrate – http://blog.fav.or.it/2008/03/31/giving-the-conversation-back-to-the-blog/ [...]
That’s good. The only problem is that the website url used for comments cannot be changed (I wasn’t able to change it). I understand that this is to help spreading the word on fav.or.it, but it’s important for bloggers to leave comment with their website url (not only for traffic). That’s why I will leave comments manually (not using the fav.or.it system).
Apart from this, you have done a great job!