HaloScan Bought Out by JS-Kit

Good and evil kittens. icanhascheezburger.com.

Tired of HaloScan Sucking? Rejoice, Rejoice, Rejoice.

The deal is scheduled to close in 30 days.

Implementation has already started.

Some of the recent suckage has to do with migration issues. The claim is, as sites migrate over -- in theory, seamlessly and you can believe as much of that as you want -- the remaining sites will go faster as the load on HaloScan's servers decreases. The migrated sites moved to JS-Kit will go faster because they're on the good stuff. Thus, all is of the good.

So they say.

We're backing up comments. A lot. Frequently.

The Washington Post

JS-Kit, a provider of Javascript comments, ratings, and poll widgets for blogs, has announced their acquisition of HaloScan, one of the largest hosted comments service providers. This announcement is also coordinated with the launch of several major features. Financial terms were not disclosed.

HaloScan had previously partnered with JS-Kit in January to provide the users of their comment system with "one-click" deployment of JS-Kit's ratings widget (providing ratings for articles, not ratings for comments). This acquisition will result in an exponential increase of JS-Kit's customer base, providing new access to over 520,000 participating sites, bringing its total reach to about 550,000 sites. JS-Kit also claims that with this new acquisition, it will be registering 300+ new sites per day. HaloScan's comment systems will integrate with JS-Kit's Ratings, Polls, Reviews, Navigator, and Advisor widgets. JS-Kit's comments also comes with full Akismet spam protection and profanity filters.

JS-Kit will leverage its newly acquired users to launch important new features. One of which is the implementation of an open standards-based, portable, user profile. Users will have access to all of the comments made on any JS-Kit participating site through an OpenID login system. The portable profile is accessible through a pop-up on the hosting site. This does lend itself to easier discovery, which could possibly help with adoption for new publishers.

This also goes hand-in-hand with another new feature that JS-Kit is implementing, SEO support. JS-Kit now sets up a static page for indexing comment content, which you can host on your server as a sub-domain, so search engines see the content on your site, and not JS-Kit's.

Faster, better, standards based. Better technical support and backup solutions.

Also, you get access to ALL comments on EVERY site you comment (with OpenID.) This is causing a fight with JS-Kit's competition. Whatever.

What I like most is GNB will get credit for links to Group News Blog -- thousands of them across the Internet over months -- which people put in comments. It certainly will drive our rankings higher. Good news babycakes.

I am pleased by their promises. Now... we shall see.

As always, what counts is action, not campaign promises.