Because a good war is fought to the end. and the Second Commentosphere War is no exception. The announcement of WordPress acquiring Intense Debate to integrate it blogging platform and to offer it as a service was a big hit for JS-KIT and Disqus. but while JS-KIT will be affected. they have the upper hand because they offer support beyond Blog Platforms and they got the best Blogger.com integration where the big numbers are in term of users and also because they got other Widget Services too beyond its Social Commenting System. Disqus response was that they would not be affected (which is of course a lie PR spin since their previous releases clearly pointed their aspirations of growth to WordPress by giving it preference) and they quickly followed by releasing an API in an attempt to search for the growth they need and to see what new opportunities can come up from it. but JS-KIT raged on and in what way. they added a partnership with ShareThis for cross promotion of each other. this is of course a response from ShareThis to Clearspring acquisition of AddThis that in turn was Clearspring response to ShareThis acquisition of Madkast (puff!)
But now it is the turn for JS-KIT to assure confidence that the announcement of WordPress and Intense Debate does not affect them at all. what better way to do it, that with a Funding round of $3.6M ?.
Their Bullet points:
JS-Kit is a leading provider of lightweight social widgets with over 550,000 registered sites using it’s hosted offerings, which include:Comments, Ratings, Product Reviews, & Polls.
The services are easy for publishers to install, simple to customize, and are an extremely low cost alternative to in-house development.
Web publishers seeking stability now have a "safe choice" for Web 2.0 services.
Funding has already enabled expansion of the development team to a dozen engineers, a quadrupling of the size of the data center, and the addition of industry visionary Chris Saad (Co-Founder DataPortability) as a Strategic Advisor.
Series B funding was led by Altos Ventures, with participation from Series A Investor TEF3.
Contact: khris@js-kit.com.
I also have to note that they don`t only announced this founding round. but announcing that Chris Saad will join them as Strategic Advisor indicated how they will be spending that money since Chris talks about what needs to change on JS-KIT to make it better in his own post about JS-KIT
via JS-KIT blog (Go there for the Full Details)
SezWho Partners With Instablogs, Gets Performance Upgrade
November 4th, 2008Not much has come out from SezWho in the Whole Craziness of JS vs Disqus or even with the news of IntenseDebate getting acquired. but SezWho has pretty much keep on going without getting distracted. not without some help though. they landed a good partnership with Instablogs and added some features in process:
They also made some upgrades to their performance in order to keep themselves as a good option for Social Commenting Systems. with the very specific difference that SezWho is a Default Comment System Social Enhancer. This difference is why they may be calmer since while they compete with JS-KIT, Disqus and IntenseDebate. they represent less of a hurdle to Bloggers since it not replaces the comment system but instead enhances it with commenter profiles and social features. that is something that will resonate since it requires less commitment and it is easily replaceable or removable.
In their case i insist that a either a acquisition by Disqus or a Merger with it would be the way to go so it could grow faster and get seriously relevant as a service. given IntenseDebate instantly turned into the Top Dog with the WordPress acquisition and independently there is just no bigger competitor that JS-KIT that continues to grow and get partnerships.
SezWho
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Tags: comments sezwho social