JS-Kit Echo

» see js-kit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Lev Walkin was a security engineer at Cisco, and JS-Kit was the thing he wrote on the side. It launched in 2006 as a piece of embed code: you pasted a script tag into your template and a comment box appeared under every post, with no server of your own and no account for your readers. TechCrunch covered it in November 2006 in about four sentences, which was the correct length for what it was at the time.

It turned into a company anyway. Walkin moved into the CTO seat and Khris Loux came in as CEO. In July 2008 JS-Kit bought Haloscan, which by then sat under a very large share of Blogspot. It bought SezWho in March 2009. That July it shipped a real-time widget called Echo, and in December 2009 the company gave up its own name and took the product's.

The Haloscan users found out what the acquisition had been for that same month. Haloscan had always been free. Echo was not. They were told to upgrade or take their threads out as XML, and on 19 February 2010 the Haloscan hardware was retired for good. The official reason was end of life on the servers, which was true and which was also not the reason.

None of this reached where I was. The hosted comment widget is an artifact of blog culture, and the conversation around me happened on forums, on donanimhaber and frmtr, under a signature block listing whatever hardware I was running that year. There was no template to paste a script tag into. The software already had comments, they were called posts, and the count under a thread was the whole point of the thread.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Comment hosting was a real business for about four years because the blog platforms were bad at comments. Blogger shipped threads late and shipped them badly, and self-hosted installs collected spam faster than their owners could delete it. A script tag that just worked was worth pasting. The catch was that nobody had figured out how anyone would pay for it, so the whole category ran on money raised against the promise of paying later.

Echo's pitch in 2009 was real time. The widget pulled reactions from elsewhere on the web into the thread under your post, so tweets and shared links appeared alongside the comments people typed directly. This was the FriendFeed idea sold to publishers, and for a moment it looked like the future. It also required the outside sites to keep their doors open, which they did not.

~ what got buried with it ~

Every one of those threads lived on somebody else's machine. When the Haloscan servers went off in February 2010, years of comments under working blog posts became an empty gap in a page, or an XML export sitting in a downloads folder that its owner never worked out how to import. Chip Bennett wrote the summary that same month under the title "Haloscan discontinued: why not to use third-party services", and it is still the correct summary.

The lesson was learned loudly and then unlearned within about eighteen months, because the people who left Haloscan mostly went to Disqus, which is the identical arrangement with a different company holding the database. Comments are the part of a website its author writes least and cares about most, and handing them to a startup remains the normal thing to do.

~ the postmortem ~

In 2012 Echo announced it was leaving the comment business. The new plan was custom social features sold to media clients, the flagship example being a chat product built for USA Network. Sites running the widget started showing notices about the coming shutdown around August, and support for every remaining JS-Kit and Haloscan module ended on 1 October 2012.

So the same company killed the same product twice, once when it was called Haloscan and once when it was called Echo, and the second time nobody wrote a warning post because everybody had already moved. Disqus took the refugees and is still standing in 2026. The lasting artifact of all this is not the software, it is the shape of the mistake: a comment thread you did not host is a comment thread you are renting.

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