bergie

Now a lot of conversations are fragmented between Qaiku, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments and dedicated forums. How could I follow and participate in all of these in one interface?

@bergie I'm not even sure that it would be useful to have "one interface to rule them all". Qaiku, Twitter and Facebook are all meant for a bit different purposes, at least in my use, and I find that using them from interfaces dedicated specifically to those purposes seems to work best. I think it's better to have few good interfaces than a one huge compromise.

@Kusti yes, each of those communities has a different role and audience. But following them separately is cumbersome. I'd like to have all comments on my blog entries in the blog, regardless of where they originate in

@bergie yup, that's the "social object" thinking, and I agree to that - I'd like to have it that way too. The comments on a blog, should be seen with the blog, no matter where the comment was cast. The status update on facebook should collect all reactions to that "social object" to facebook etc.

@Kusti I don't think it as an interface, I'd like to see it more as a feature that should be adopted by all services. That's the thing http://js-kit/echo is trying to do.

@Jemiweb @bergie oh, now i get it, that ECHO project looks really promising! I'd definitely like all the services I use to implement such functionality.

Is there any way to refer to another commenter in ECHO? I think that's the most valuable function in a comment thread like that: if I participate in loads of them, I can't always be able to follow all the discussion in all of them, so it would be useful to know if someone is speaking to me directly, a functionality similar to that achieved in Qaiku with pings. If that sort of functionality could be implemented not by each service separately but instead directly to ECHO, it would be an ideal conversation platform.

@Jemiweb the problem is ownership of content. If I remember correctly Echo is just a JS widget that keeps everything on the provider's server. Instead of being stuck with a proprietary commenting widget I want to be able to implement discussion features in my own way and syndicate data with an open standard across the networks

@bergie take a look at this blog: http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com...

A paragraph from the blog by Chris Saad:
This person does not understand my definition of Open. Echo is open because it is not a destination site, it sits on any site anywhere. The owner of that site can take it off and replace it with another engagement tool at any time. The data being absorbed by Echo, for the most part, is RSS or Atom, and the data coming out of Echo is RSS.

So the content is not stuck in Echo, you can access it and save it wherever you want. It's more a content aggregator. If you manage to do it better, well then I think everyone is happy. Also the Echo creators, as they then can focus more on the delivering a easy and good service.

@Jemiweb I did a quick search and noticed two competitors of Echo: disqus and IntenseDebate. Do you have any insight on how Echo is related to them?