Echo Launches Eye Catching Real-Time Recent Comments Widget

Echo, the real-time comment engine formerly known as JS-Kit, has launched a new real-time recent comments widget that allows publishers to embed a stream of their users’ latest comments and tweets on their homepage and alongside articles.

The widget can display comments left anywhere on the publisher’s site, or they can elect to only show comments from a certain subsection. Likewise, publishers can elect to display all of the related comments, tweets, Diggs, and other social reactions that Echo can track, or they can choose which they want to show.

Game changing? Probably not, but these real-time widgets have a tendency to catch the viewer’s eye, so I suspect this will be effective. I’m also guessing publishers will take a pretty heavy hand with moderating the comments that appear in the feed, given how poor many comments appear on popular sites.

Echo VP Product and Community Strategy Chris Saad says that the company’s widgets are now on “hundreds of thousands” of sites but that the stat that counts most is page views — Echo gets around 650 million page views per month.