Echo Prepares World for Migration to a Web of Streams

The foundation of the Web is moving from one of unchanging static pages to continually updated streams fed by external services. Gone is the time when publishing an article or a site was the final step in creating content. Instead, this can often signify the beginning of the content's life, as it is shared, retweeted, liked, commented on, and further distributed. Echo, a company that first made its name in the comments space, explained to a full hall of industry onlookers Tuesday morning that dynamic social experiences are going to rule the future of the Internet, further arguing they have placed themselves at the center of this trend, having built a flexible environment for people to tap into the activity streams and benefit from the Web's continued evolution, instead of seeing visitors capitulate to household name social networks.

Companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have unlocked billions of dollars in revenue around user streams of content, while traditional publishers have often held to traditional business models, unable to keep pace, said Echo's CEO, Khris Loux. "Today's publishers are ill-served to serve even their own audiences," he said. "The conversations, traffic flow and revenues have moved on."

What Echo recommended was to give publishers, ecommerce sites and startups the capability to craft user-centric, stream-centric experiences themselves, tapping into activity stream data as the unit of currency to power interactive next generation sites. To accomplish this work, the Echo team has created a stream server to deliver real-time experiences that support the existing brand and content without traditional costs of real-time. It was explained the company's new stream server supports thousands of queries per second, with live updates, based on open standards, with each item passing through the stream having the opportunity to be touched with the appropriate action (such as likes, replies, flags, votes, promotes, etc.)

But rather than building out a complex product portfolio to white label or charge premium fees to customers, Echo told attendees yesterday that they work "up to the API" and partner with other startups to connect their services to end users.

"We have coded up to the API and no further," said Loux. "It's scary as we can't solve anyone's problem ourselves. But that also means our partners have as much power as we do."

Echo, since its product shift in 2009, has signed up many top name brands to its platform, some of whom presented Tuesday, including Sports Illustrated. Displayed on SI.com and other partners' sites were real-time comments, user reactions, badges and achievements, and a visually appealing image gallery for hosted graphics. Partners supplying many of these things included Realtidbits, Janrain, Klout, Badgeville, Branchnext, Clicky and Arktan, who claim to have connected to Echo through open standards, enabling customers to switch providers in the future if desired.

"It's the beginning of a new way to look at software," Loux said. The company hopes to also offer a custom application store that enables partners to connect hours of effort to dollars through showcasing their apps on the market. Executing on a planned feature that is stream-centric looks right. Echo's demos from Tuesday and well before are showing real promise about the future of the Web. Rather than shying away from competing with the Web giants, Echo and its partners are set to offer a serious alternative - keeping ownership of the entire social experience on the corporate site.

Disclosure: Chris Saad, an Echo employee, and I occasionally collaborate on the Edge Theory conversations series, and I consider him a good friend.

Real-Time News Needs to Reward Authenticity, Curation

At the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco event Wednesday, Echo's Khris Loux sat down with me and representatives from UltraKnowledge, CBS Interactive (formerly CNET) and CNN.com to discuss the rise of citizen journalism and social media, intertwined with traditional journalism, and how mainstream media outlets can adapt their practices to include curation as part of their offerings. Our panel's determination could be summarized as saying the ability for the public to launch stories and extend storylines related to realtime has removed the ability for mainstream media to be gatekeepers, furthering the need to accurately determine authenticity and truth. And where mainstream media cannot have exceptional access, be it to geography, sources or timing, part of their new role is to discover and highlight high quality content, regardless of its source, in effect, adopting the role of curator.

Best exemplified by CNN.com's iReport, citizen journalists are being given a chance to report on equal footing with the mainstream media. While iReport gives these would-be reporters a place to piggyback on a major brand, many others have taken to their own blogs, social networks or Twitter to report live, and unlike the traditional approach where media authors would issue a story and call it a day, the life of a story now often starts when it hits the Web, spawning comments, shares and retweets. But as citizen journalists and bloggers are given the same capability to gain visibility, mainstream media's much-celebrated structure to put articles and stories through the vetting process sometimes falls astray in the race to get the story out quickly.

CNN's iReport Has "Vetted" about 5% of all Submissions Today

All time, about 7% of all Submissions are "Vetted".

A little over two years ago, I highlighted how quickly incorrect news can spread in the age of microblogging. (See: Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.) While many of us know not to believe everything on the Web, even if it is in Wikipedia, there remains a need to separate fact from fiction. With so many publications out there reporting on the same information at the same time, without having additional insight, the task of curating the very best of the analysis and repeaters can become a very serious task.

In January, I broached this issue, asking, "Can You Filter for Quality News Amidst Instant Analysis?" and earlier still, in December, highlighting how some news organizations are in fact incentivized for behavior which may lead away from taking the extra effort sometimes required to get the story right. (See: Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don't Address Incentives)

As excited and promotional as I am about the ability for anyone to create and share content, I am equally worried that incentives to promote the discovery of accuracy are not clearly defined, and it is often very difficult to find a real authority on a given topic in a world of instant analysis. When a story breaks in a real-time platform, like Twitter, the person who first reported the earthquake, or was present on the scene of an event, is only an expert for a short time, and when that topic has faded, new influencers for new stories are needed. This leads to a need for trusted sources to harness the truth from the originator of news, wherever it may be, mass media or citizen journalism, and rapidly verify accuracy.

But the sheer volume of feedback can overwhelm even the most well-intended. CNN.com reported one recent popular article achieved more than 30,000 comments - a practical impossibility to moderate by humans, leading to the desire to somehow separate the wheat from the chaff and surface the most accurate and supported insight. As one knows, trusting the community is possible, but usually results in an across the board maligning of those who share opposing views. See any political blog or sports blog for this particular variety of trench warfare. See any comment stream on Yahoo! News or on YouTube to see the quality of the masses at work.

The answer lies in finding a way to reward the truth-seekers in the real-time Web, and to reward media, be they an established brand or an emerging one, for discovering accurate insights, or simply harnessing them. The world of real-time storytelling is evolving before our eyes, and in some cases, its sheer ephemeral nature promises to introduce as many issues as it solves. We, as readers, creators and sharers, should be working diligently to keep our streams clean and provide value to all those who come in contact with our content.

For more thoughts, see Echo's essay: Real-time Storytelling

Echo Debuts Real-Time River, Highlights Reader Activity

After declaring the world of traditional comments dead last year, Echo has continued its quest to bring the world of real time reactions from around the Web to publishers looking to surface more engagement with their community. Today, Echo introduces a product they call "Echo River", which brings responses from commenters to media stories practically to equal footing of that of the author, raising the visibility and surfacing real-time feedback that practically promises to make sites more sticky as users participate.

Last month, Echo introduced a "Recent Comments" widget, which brought the newest responses to the front of the site. This new real-time widget updates live, not requiring refresh. It plays a key role in this morning's update, as the comments widget runs alongside River-enabled sites, which also display real-time comment counts for new entries, and nests the reactions (be they from comments on the site, Twitter, Digg or other sources) below the entry.

Echo, which has a wide array of large media customers in its roster, highlighted its River offering with staged demos on Slate.com, TechCrunch and Mashable. The River function even managed to pull comments from disparate technology sources, such as WordPress (on TechCrunch) and Disqus (from Mashable). This move further separates Echo from its assumed competition, and puts them more into the real-time space, rather than vanilla comments.

"Displaying conversations on the home page in this way changes the way people see the front page of a typical news site," said Chris Saad, VP of Strategy for Echo in a press release. "Readers get to see a summary of what people like them are saying right from the front page, getting a new perspective on the headlines of the day... This new product continues our mission to turn static web pages into vibrant real-time experiences, driving Facebook style engagement on our publisher sites."

While the old way of comments might be dead, by their positioning, what this new product does do, for its premium members, is practically give sites' community equal prominence to that of the original writer, who sees their work do battle with often opinionated readers. And if a conversation flareup does ignite, Echo will show each update in real time. It's enough of a push that the service's executives used lofty phrases about changing the world of publishing "one product at a time", fighting against a world of static media.

For premium subscribers to Echo, adding the new River functionality is simple, just requiring a little Javascript code. The company says the River can be customized as to its content and appearance.

Disclosure: Chris Saad of Echo and I occsionally co-host the Edge Theory Conversations podcast.

Echo's Reactions Platform Hits It Big With Old Media

When JS-Kit first announced their Echo platform, declaring the death of comments, many thought it to be hyperbole. But as we have seen with a metamorphosis of the way people react to content around the Web, sharing it downstream with followers on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and many other outposts, blog comments no longer hold the lofty role they once did, and it has become increasingly important to discover reactions - wherever they are. Since that announcement almost a year ago, JS-Kit rebranded as Echo, and has been promoting their premium reaction platform to more than just blogs - but old media titans. Today, the company announced a wide array of publishers who have chosen Echo to capture their real-time reaction stream.

Included in the morning's announcement were names such as The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Forbes, and Sports Illustrated. In a quick e-mail announcement the company said they were "extremely excited and gratified to be working with these high profile and influential brands, helping each of them create real-time conversations on their sites."

In parallel, the company also relaunched its Web site, now at http://aboutecho.com/.

Unlike its Web 2.0 cousin, Disqus, Echo is not focused on offering a free comment platform for bloggers, and has been creating a robust system that starts at $99 a year. For its part, Disqus announced the acquisition of Harvard Business Review as a customer today. Also, recently, Intense Debate, the quietest of the three offerings, was selected by TechCrunch as the tech blog's comments engine.

Echo's announcement can also be found on their Web site: Echo partners with Washington Post, Time, Forbes and others