Online Feedback Aggregator

A recent article at Technology Review discussed a new business called Livefyre. It is an online service dedicated to making interaction with Facebook, Twitter, and other discussion-based sites all possible on the website where the actual content is at.

It essentially aggregates all comments made regarding the article from any source and adds them to a "comment section" underneath it. This comment section is much more like a discussion section, however, as it constantly updates without refreshing the page. The user will also be able to see all others who are currently browsing the article and know how popular it is.

The developers of this service see connectivity of these services as the next important step in social networking and hope "the publisher will get more page views and advertising dollars," because of the technology. This might be key if online journalism is to flourish, especially if pay-to-view methods start to consistently fail and online advertising must be relied on.

This system is supposed to make people more likely to comment on something as there is a visible audience of people looking over that same article, and they want their comments to be seen by that audience, hopefully resulting in discussions.

I personally hope something like this would result in fewer of the typical comments you could find on CNN's online articles, where a lot of the "comments" are just hate-filled ignorance fests. We'll have to see if this method is successful.

Photo Credit Jordan Kretchmer