JS-Kit have been in the news recently, with the announcement of a deal with Sun Microsystems to supply JS-Kit comments and other widgets throughout Sun’s properties. Having been slightly underwhelmed by their official press release, I thought I’d catch up with JS-Kit’s Chris Saad in person.
Chris is VP of Product Strategy at JS-Kit, and agreed to answer a few questions about the company’s development, and also some related to Data Portability, and Terms of Service (TOS) related to Data Ownership – obviously a hot topic this week.
Q: You acquired Haloscan in July 08, which of course gave you access to over half a million sites using that service. Have your expectations been met in the last six months, and what new opportunities or synergy do you see as a result of this coming up in the next year or so?
Haloscan was the service that started it all. It was the pioneer! So we are very proud to have been able to acquire it and continue to support its users. Unfortunately though, the platform is getting quite dated and the founder/servers are no longer accessible so we are working hard to upgrade all the users to JS-Kit as smoothly as possible.
Over the next year look for that process to be completed (sooner rather than later) and for both JS-Kit and Haloscan sites to continue to see massive improvements in features, speed, stability and support.
Q: You of course support OpenID in your widgets, and we know Chris Saad as a co-founder of DataPortability. In the context of developments like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, what do you see as the critical factors for any company looking to 1) verify identity and 2) act as a trusted keeper of personal data.
Verifying real world identity is an interesting area of potential innovation. It’s not strictly related to DataPortability though. We have some ideas around this but nothing to announce just yet.
Regarding trusted custodianship of data, we have a new initiative that will be announced next week to make our intentions even clearer than they are today.
We are of course actively participating in the DataPortability project (I am on the Steering group and chair the Communications Taskforce), we have announced our intention to support all appropriate login mechanisms and plan to implement all the recommendations of the DataPortability project – some even before they become fully ratified.
Q: Facebook’s recent climb-down on its Terms of Service (TOS) changes highlights an issue that, with the increasing trend to being able to share and repackage data, will become more important. It may be relatively clear who owns copyright in an image or a recording, but conversations about an image, or added to a thread in a blog, or comments related to a video, are more complex, as they can exist only with the implied or express consent of multiple parties. What do you see as the key factors that surround this issue – and what developments do you think will be critical here in the future?
First, clear, jargon-free statements from publishers and tool vendors will be critical to helping users understand what they can reasonably expect from their social experiences on any given service.
The DataPortability project is working on this problem in its TOS/EULA Taskforce.
There are also all sorts of gray areas when it comes to ownership. If we both contribute to a shared piece of data, who gets to delete it? These are hard questions, but that does not mean we can ignore them. Clear lines can and should be drawn. Some of those lines will be Social Contracts rather than legal or technical ones. The ones we can define in code or terms of service, however, should be defined and placed in the public domain for all to reference and use.
Q: Finally, anything you’d like to blow your trumpet about?
We love our users – their feedback is inspiring. Stay tuned because a heterogeneous social web requires social tools that play well with everyone. This year is the year to start implementing many of the things that were discussed last year.
The last few weeks, the Next Web Blog is all about crowd-sourcing. I’m not sure why, maybe we’re just inspired by the US elections. We started with launching a GooseGrade competition (correct our spelling and grammar and have the chance of winning a Flip Video), now we’ve integrated a rating feature.
In the comments section you can let us know what you think of a certain post (see picture right). From your ratings, we hope to learn what kind of posts you guys like and which can be considered “popular”.
Don’t write for your audience, write about stuff that you find both interesting and are good at. Rockstars don’t care about their audience, they care about their music.
We agree with him.., sort of. We will always bring (European) tech news which is a bit on the edge, but still, we’d love to hear what kind of topics deserve more attention.
Khris Loux from JS-Kit supported us with his awesome ratings widget. He’s a great friend (there’s your disclosure) and it’s a pleasure to use his service for improving our blog.
Khris Loux is a special guy. He’s one of the most optimistic and energetic persons I’ve met. That was during The Next Web conference, last April. He gave a keynote about open standards and interviewed Mr. DataPortability, Chris Saad, on stage. They certainly connected, and not just on the white couch: industry visionary Saad has joined Js-Kit as a Strategic Advisor.
But Loux’s positive attitude not just serves his network, he also managed to close a second round of funding in a time that everybody seems too busy worrying about the credit crunch.
JS-Kit’s Series B was led by Altos Ventures, with participation from Series A Investor TEF3. With the financial injection of $3 million, total funding of JS-Kit comes down to $4.8 million.
Thanks social media revolution, time for the next level
Next to the new strategic adviser, the funding of the social widgets provider has already enabled expansion of the development team to a dozen engineers and a quadrupling of the size of the data center. Loux: “We are now at 12 engineers and plan to continue to grow that team to support our growing user base.”
Loux also says he “has been proud to be part of the social media revolution” and that he “looks forward to taking things to the next level in the coming months and years”. Meaning that JS-Kit will also expand its commercial activities to achieve profitability in the medium term.
Nice-looking stats
When looking at both the statistics of Quintcast (cookies installed in the US) and Compete (visitors from the US), anyone can tell JS-Kit’s reach is increasing. Partly thanks to partnerships with major media players like WorldNow (good for 19 million potential users). When taking that in account, it’s actually not that surprising that JS-Kit keeps investing, financial crisis or not.
Khris Loux is CEO and co-founder of JS-Kit, a start-up company that provides widgets to easily add interactivity to your site:
Our simple, modular and fully customizable web-services, also known as “widgets”, are fast becoming the building blocks of rich, interactive online experiences for leading-edge web sites. These solutions are self-service, elegant, powerful, and easily deployed by HTML neophytes, experts and everyone in between.
Khris Loux is CEO and co-founder of JS-Kit, a start-up company that provides widgets to easily add interactivity to your site:
Our simple, modular and fully customizable web-services, also known as “widgets”, are fast becoming the building blocks of rich, interactive online experiences for leading-edge web sites. These solutions are self-service, elegant, powerful, and easily deployed by HTML neophytes, experts and everyone in between.
Widgets are often referred to as the “bling bling” of Web 2.0 but JS-Kit takes the next step in widget development by providing customizable services which complement and build on each other. Loux’s talk titled “Web 3.0 or Web 3D?, The Decentralization, Disaggregation and Democratization of the Web” deals with the new dimension that widgets add to the web.
JS-kit provides simple lightweight web applications, widgets, that add rich interactive features to any site or blog. This is done by simply copying and pasting a piece of code in order to experience an Amazon class service. By lowering the technical and financial bar they allow smaller companies to compete with major services. JS-Kit addresses the long tail of business so a startup does not need to spend precious money on programmers to add customer interactivity to their site. In fact, their services are so light-weight that even big companies such as Yahoo use them on some parts of their site. Yahoo developers said they chose to use the JS-Kit widgets because they are so easy to use.
The next phase on the web
If Web 1.0 was about publishers teaching the truth and Web 2.0 revolved around bloggers balancing out the web then Web 3.0 is about publishers joining the conversation and consumers becoming part of the business. The structure of the web is changing and Web 3.0 concerns itself with connecting cross-points. Loux compares the evolution of the web with the human brain which is amazingly good at connecting distributed information.
Loux presents a somewhat utopian vision where search is replaced with a process where “everything that you needed would be right there.” SEO is a treadmill because we are all playing the same game and everyone is getting better at it. We need to skip SEO and advertising and instead take the true value of the product and spread it out. Widgets allow you to spread information out and bind relevant information.
Trust
Companies need to bridge the credibility gap by making the potential buyer be aware of the status of the transaction before it is actually made. Widgets allow customers to rate products or even rate the company. Where would you rather buy your products? With a company which has been rated reliable or with a company whose status is unknown? By making the whole process is more transparent both companies and buyers win. Trust, user ratings, transparency and user interaction are important factors in the direction the web is currently taking.
Open standards
Ownership is also an important issue on the distributed web as you should have a right to you own content. Social networks trap your content in their sites and you do not get paid for it. The value of their site is their idea filled with your content but where is the download button, where is the “I want to leave now and take all my stuff” button? Loux notes that it is hard to get the legal community involved in these questions. In the long term we need a Creative Commons style licensing to have a balanced relationship with these sites. In order to prevent stifled innovation we need open standards.
As a consumer we should demand OpenID access and be able to take our data out. Loux states that we should challenge the big companies and blog about open standards. Especially start-ups should embrace open standards because they are in the long tail of business. According to Loux startups can change the currently closed social network environment by adopting open standards. Startups are the new generation based on open standards. Startups can avoid the closed business cycle by taking up the power and empower the community.
Startups in the long tail hold the power to embrace open standards and challenge the big companies.
Khris Loux is the CEO and co-founder of JS-Kit. That’s a freakishly simple, non-obtrusive, self-contained, mostly-free widget service. He’s one of the speakers and the Next Web and before he climbs the stage, Khris would like to know YOUR opinion about the subject. So go to the Next Web page he created and let him know what you think. He just told me that he will react on your comment during his keynote. So let’s reward this great and innovative idea of Khris by sending in a helluva lot comments.
Written on 20th February 2009
1 COMMENT 
JS-Kit have been in the news recently, with the announcement of a deal with Sun Microsystems to supply JS-Kit comments and other widgets throughout Sun’s properties. Having been slightly underwhelmed by their official press release, I thought I’d catch up with JS-Kit’s Chris Saad in person. 
Written on 7th November 2008
In the comments section you can let us know what you think of a certain post (see picture right). From your ratings, we hope to learn what kind of posts you guys like and which can be considered “popular”. 
Written on 26th May 2008
Written on 3rd April 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
