We have long talked about ‘bringing blogging to the masses’ and today we have released a new version of fav.or.it which we think moves a quite a few steps towards that goal. We hope that we have firstly simplified the interaction with blogosphere and in turn made it accessible to a whole new audience. And for the more tech aware users we hope we have a raft of features that will also appeal. I will be following up this with individual’s posts that cover each of our major features but for now I will leave you with a bullet point list of what we think are the most important.

If you want to follow us live during the launch follow me on twitter

Key Features

• Integrated commenting – comments go back to the source
• Simplified sharing – sending of links back to common sites without opening extra windows
• Conversation tracking – track the sites you have left comments on and be automatically notified of people replying to you.
• Simple Threads – We don’t like fully threaded conversations, so we came up with a great alternative, comments are still date ordered, but you can click and see the thread for who replied to who.
• Voting – Our voting system works on time + votes! (see below for details)
• Easy login – we support 12 (more to come!) identity types (e.g. twitter, openid, del.icio.us, wordpress, blogger) which can be used to sign in an get started without any other registration required.
• Identity management – Any number of identities can be merged together to help centralize your commenting, and for every service added extra features are added. (e.g. notification of new comments out to your life stream service, and sharing links to book marking services.)
• Simple search – Enter a keyword and the engine will help you filter down by category + by related keywords to help you find what you want.
• Human powered search – If you disagree with the category or tags that a particular post has, you can change it! If the community agrees then it gets changed.
• Widgets – We launch with a widget that shows the most popular content from fav.or.it – this is fully customizable.