The world of comments on blogs has changed quite a lot just in the past few years. Once the central discussion point for all activity around posts, comments have become distributed, floating to a myriad of social networks and RSS feed readers, while still others are simply retweeting the items they like. The changes were enough to see one comment provider, JS-Kit, say that comments were "dead". Meanwhile, amidst the noise, Disqus has rolled out version 3 of its product today, providing a new, smoother look and feel, and most-importantly for today's Web, real-time updating and greatly improved "reactions" that pull in activity from around the Internet.


Disqus Has Now Split Into Two With Profiles and Comments
In parallel with the company's revamp of its comments engine, Disqus has also added a separate product, called your Profile, which lets users add or delete comments, without impacting the original site, and also presents yet another place to add your third party services, so you can tie all your activities on a post through your profile. Other benefits include a personal URL, such as http://www.disqus.com/louismg for me.


My New Disqus Profile


The New Look of Disqus Comments
Disqus's improvements are coming none too soon. With a great deal of comments taking place elsewhere, as I mentioned with my recent post on Google Reader, and have seen with various sites trying out JS-Kit's Echo platform, the world of comments on the blog has to adapt. I just wonder how the real-time aspect of comments can keep people on the site instead of venturing somewhere else, where they may have established a community. I am looking forward to seeing Disqus 3 play a more connected role to the social ecosystem.

I am enjoying seeing the growth in Web services tailored to finding the very best news just for me. From My6Sense's attempt to only show me the best news, and hiding the less-important items, to Lazyfeed's topics-based blog search engine, we've recently seen two interesting approaches to cutting through information overload and finding the best data. A new invite-only beta service, called Parse.ly, claims to offer "fresh content" with "minimal garnish", and, leveraging my interests, gives me the highest-ranked stories, derived not just from my leanings, but how strongly I find myself aligned with specific topics. The result is another news source with an outstanding signal to noise ratio.

If you are among the lucky few who has thus far obtained access to Philadelphia-based Parse.ly (I am betting the best way is to follow their Twitter account), you start by entering terms you want to find news on, and dragging them to boxes that signify your intensity of interest. The five boxes range from "Most" to "Extremely", "Very", "Moderately" and "Somewhat", in descending order.


Prioritizing My News In Parse.ly
Per my usual approach, I filled the boxes with tech terms, and deigned to see if Parse.ly could find me new, interesting stories about the topics I am most interested in. And it came through - no question.

Each of the buckets ("Somewhat" to "Most") gained a numerical score, from 2 to 10. As a result if a blog post had two of my "10 point words" in its title or excerpt, it would have 20 points, and be pushed to the top of the results queue. Higher yet would be a story on Google around Pubsubhubbub and RSS, which weighed in at 28 points, sporting two 10 point words and an 8 pointer. Like traditional feed readers, Parse.ly shows the title of the story and the date, but it also includes a short summary and, yes, the post's numerical score. Sorting by score shows the highest ranking results.


My Starred Items In A Parse.ly Reading Pane

How Stories Got Scored Based On My Preferences
If you click on a story in the standard view, an excerpt is displayed in the reading pane, which also features a "Score Explanation". And if you click on the story itself, a new window will open with a Parse.ly share bar, prompting you to either save the story for later viewing, or share it to a myriad of other social networks.


The Parse.ly Sharebar In Action on eWeek
Parse.ly clearly states that its focus is all about the content and minimal when it comes to garnish (or design). That's absolutely the case. The product is reminiscent of GMail and Google Reader with its simple interface and the ability to star items, or show only read and unread items. You can also archive old items or delete them, just like you would for old e-mails and RSS feeds.

I am eager to see Parse.ly open up and let people get into the product, for while I have plenty of places to get news, Parse.ly has among the best I've ever seen in terms of quality. The company even says it could be a solid alternative to Google Alerts. Not a single spam blog was found, a testament to Parse.ly's selection from 50,000 different sources. The option to share out to other networks will also make it an interesting part of the social ecosystem.

Last week, many people were surprised by Facebook releasing a utility that let Fan Page owners update Twitter from the popular social network. But some thought Facebook did not go far enough - as individuals could not utilize this tool to broadcast their own update from their profiles. This morning, Jesse Stay's SocialToo launched a feature which will let users update both Facebook and Twitter - not just for their fan pages, but from anywhere on the site.

Using the SocialToo Status application, you can share your personal status from Facebook to your personal news feed, as well as Twitter.

If you are already a SocialToo user, go to http://www.socialtoo.com and click the "Facebook App" link to activate SocialToo Status. Once the application is enabled for your account, you will see a SocialToo Status icon in the "attachments" section of Facebook, which you can update from the home screen, or your personal profile. If you have already associated your Twitter account with Facebook, it will ask for permission to publish, and following this, you're all set. You can even grant the application permission to publish from fan pages you may run as well.


If enabled, my posts from Facebook can flow to Twitter as well.

For a long time, power users of social media tools have found ways to bring their Twitter updates into Facebook. But now, you're seeing the first tools start to take data the other direction. You can also find the SocialToo application on Facebook here: http://apps.facebook.com/socialtoo/status.

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Disclosure: I am an advisor to SocialToo

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I thought it was a bad sign at the end of 2008 and first half of 2009 when practically every new service or application that came my way was simply an extension to or enhancement of other already-popular social networks, almost always for Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed. Even then, the cacophony of noise around Twitter practically drowned out all of it. Amid an unrelenting flurry of Twitter clients for desktop and Web and Twitter tools for unfollowing, grouping, analyzing and reporting, we also had a rush of Twitter-related sites, all aiming to find their own special niche. Among the most successful, after a slow start, was TweetMeme, the brainchild of Fav.or.it founder Nick Halstead, who managed to repurpose the company and ride the wave of Twitter and retweeting at the perfect time. Seeing his success, a new challenger with a killer domain name (ReTweet.com) is looking to unseat him, by essentially doing the same thing - tabulating the most popular shared items on Twitter.

Scratch that. They're doing the exact same thing, and the complete copycat style is insulting to anybody who deigned to take them seriously. While I had seen complaints about copyright infringement and code borrowing, I had no idea how terrible the attempt had been until tonight, when it became crystal clear how much ReTweet.com stole from TweetMeme before hitting the publish button.

On first glance, both sites display what you would expect - popular articles from often retweeted sites like Mashable.com and the comic XKCD.com. Popular post titles have very similar numerical scores, as you would also expect - varying as little as just over 1 percent on articles that have more than 1,000 retweets. And yes, both let you dice and slice the data by one day or seven (although ReTweet.com calls it one week instead of 7 days and TweetMeme.com calls it 24 hours instead of 1 day. You get it...).

I've seen Digg and I've seen Digg clones. I've seen popular aggregators and their clones. I've seen social networks and their clones. And I recognize that sites that serve similar functions are yes, going to look similar. But once you move past the similar front page, the blatant stealing is jaw-dropping.


TweetMeme has a top level navigation bar, which read from left to right, says:

1. Home
2. Comedy
3. Entertainment
4. Gaming
5. Lifestyle
6. Science
7. Sports
8. Technology
9. World&Business

In remarkable non-contrast, ReTweet.com features this:

1. Home
2. Entertainment
3. Gaming
4. Lifestyle
5. Science
6. Sports
7. Technology
8. World&Business
9. Everything

Wow. Did they really think we were so dumb as to not notice they had the exact same title headers in the exact same order? Even down to the ampersand in "World & Business"? Really?

I don't even want to begin to understand why people think this is okay. While Nick and I once disagreed about his first product's direction and how well that beta was prepared, I never questioned his company's trying to do something different in a competitive landscape. But what ReTweet.com is doing is upsetting. While a service like TweetMeme.com was practically inevitable, and competition is healthy, this kind of stealing and underhanded non-innovation is troubling. If this is what is acceptable from engineering teams these days, then innovative services have got to be worried about protecting their intellectual property.

When, at last month's Lunch 2.0 panel, I asked Bret Taylor of FriendFeed how he felt about services like Facebook and Google Reader borrowing aspects of FriendFeed, such as the "Like" feature, he said he felt "good" because he was making an impact on the Web and it showed alignment between differing Web properties, adding he didn't feel the company could patent words on a Web page. But I am sure the level of copycat dunderheadery on the part of ReTweet.com is not something any of us should "feel good" about. If you want to compete in this space, and you want to take on a market leader, you have got to make sure you offer real differentiation based on different source data, different splicing, different display or different intent. This attempt is a sorry gimmick that has got to have the TweetMeme.com team seeing red, and rightly so.

I'm done linking to ReTweet.com now. The next time I want to be writing about them is if they get sued or when they close down. Not impressed. This kind of launch is bad for innovation and bad for the Web.