SezWho.com Homepage

It’s with mixed feeling that I want to announce the acquisition of SezWho by JS-Kit.

On one hand I am sad to announce that the SezWho service will now only be available for 1 more month. It’s been an exhilarating experience launching the service a year and a half back and having 30,000 publishers put their trust in us for adding social features to their sites.

On the other hand, I am excited to be working with JS-Kit to ensure our customers have a clear upgrade path to great JS-Kit products. JS-Kit is  the world’s largest distributed social network, connecting over 600,000 publishers with light weight, cross domain services, including Comments, Ratings, and Polls.

To get started with upgrading to JS-Kit services, please visit us here.

Thank you for all your support and feedback over the last 2 years. I hope to work with all of you again.

- Jitendra Gupta, Founder/CEO, SezWho

One of the features we continuously bring up is our aggregation of images from multiple repositories like gravatar, mybloglog, blogcatalog (and our own repository, if you choose to upload it here). This takes the hassle away of from the users of maintaining the avatar in one more repository.

Yesterday, we made code changes to add a few behind the scenes enhancements. Though very visible when your Entrecard or blogger.com profile image shows up in a SezWho enabled blog. Yes, we added Entrecard and blogger.com profile images in the mix. We made other improvements and bug fixes to increase quality and efficiency of the service.

SezWho has developed a great new application extension that connects you with Facebook. Now, when you submit a post, comment or rating on a site, you can see it on your Facebook wall, automatically. Let all your friends see your comments and read what you have to say. Better yet, make them a part of the conversation and have them post their comments on their Facebook wall too, using Sezwho’s new feature. Once you set up a SezWho account, all you have to do to get started is to sign up for Facebook Connect. It’s easy!

To enable SezWho Facebook connect - go to myaccount page:

Go through the guided set of steps:

Make sure you see the “Congratulations” text at the bottom of the page

You are all set…Now go ahead and comment, post or rate on a SezWho enabled site and see it automatically appear on your Facebook wall

Happy sharing and as always your feedback is welcome.

Over a period of many months we noticed that users came to our site, downloaded the plugin, installed it and gone! Like many other plugins, the expectation from SezWho plugin is download-install-activate-done. I wish it could be this simple.

However, SezWho plugin requires a small alphanumeric string (the blog key) to identify your blog. We require that users register with us with their email and add the blog in our system. This registration generates a blog key which you add it in the Plugin Admin screen (For blogger.com users, they add a javascript scriptlet).

Before our redesign, we had the plugin download link openly available, right on the homepage — which resulted in users just downloading the plugin and not following up with registration. Moreover, the download was is (we have to still fix the terminology) a misnomer because we also support blogger.com as a SezWho gadget. Now, the plugin download link is deliberately removed from our main pages and instead it is within the “My Account” as shown here (click on the image to see a larger version):

Among other things, we also reduced multiple entry points for registrations and simplified other parts of user registration process.

What do you think? Still having issues? Drop us a note at support@sezwho.com, we’ll help you fix’em.

For the past few weeks, we have been working on doing a rejig of our website. We went live with the new design and the logo early this week. There are few more things to come. A brief introduction can be seen in the crisp slideshare presentation below.

 … and yeah, we have to change the shell of this blog as well.

Last week we rolled out a new feature allowing customization of SezWho UI in blogger blogs. This functionality allows a blog author to disable/enable ratings and customize the text which shows on the rating ‘bar’. This feature was available for a long time for other SezWho plugins.

If you have a blogger blog, this feature can be accessed by logging into SezWho ‘My Account’ and then accessing the ’Edit Presentation’ of that particular blog.

Here is a screen capture from the ‘Edit Presentation’ screen:

Feature Details

1. Enable/Disable Comment Rating — Turn on/off the comment rating. Self-explanatory. There may be times when you want to turn the comment rating off.

2. Enable/Disable Post Rating — When? Say, you have a blog about Pokémon protagonists and you don’t want it to be rated. Simple, switch the ratings off. The ratings are blog specific. I would love to have it post-specific, but that feature is in our pipeline.

3. Enable/Disable SezWho Avatar on the post — This is mostly used when you have customized your template to include an avatar of your own. Better to leave it on as we also aggregate from gravatar, mybloglog (and blogcatalog, for our BlogCatalog users)

4. Enable/Disable Profile Link — The SezWho profile displays the latest activity stream of that particular commenter or post author. Your visitors can hover (or click) on “Who Am I?” link and and view the activity stream. Good idea to have it “on” to keep your blog interactive.

5 & 6. Custom Profile Link Label & Profile Link Separators — These are two individual options which allow you to customize the text for the profile Link. Most of the blogs use our new default option, viz. Who Am I? surrounded by two regular brackets. You can be fancy/creative here. The popular ones are: “It’s me dude!”, “Who is this guy?”, etc.

7.  Custom Rating Text — Be default, the rating text is “Rate This”. You can have your own version such as “Rate this content”, etc.

If you see issues drop us a note at support@sezwho.com.

We have  been working on a major upgrade to address some of the performance issues and finally the changes are live. Some of the new features are:

1. Support for local CSS/JS  (for WP). With this option SezWho CSS and JS files are now served from you local server…So no more waiting for JS to load.

2. JS is now a lot more compact (effects both BG and WP performance)

This means your load times will improve at least 25% and potentially a lot more.

3. Support for Blogger templates for both classic and new templates. This will improve the performance for Blogger by preloading the SezWho UI. See the details at http://blog.sezwho.com/blog/2008/08/01/template-changes-for-blogger/.

There are a number of additional exciting new configuration options. See the article below for many more new features.

As usual we treat support issues as our highest priority so if you have feedback for us or run into issues, please post to our support forums or send us an email at support@sezwho.com and we will be happy to help.

Performance upgrade giveaway : Tell us the load times your are getting with the new changes by leaving a comments below and we will randomly  choose 3 participants and send them our cool new Polo t-shirt with our Logo.

Update: 2.2 release is now in production

Check out the WP 2.2 Beta release (Blog catalog version will be available shortly)…Lots of goodies here:

1. Support for templates for comments (See this blog for an example of how they look). With the comment templates users can have good looking threaded comments while keeping the comments in their own DB. We are supporting 4 different look and feel for the comment templates. All of them support threading and have robust SezWho integration. Although we would love to have you use these templates with SezWho :-), but if for some reason, you want to use them independently of SezWho that should be possible as well. (The templates as is the case with plug-in are available under GPL and we will provide the documentation on how to use them independently shortly.)

2. Support for Thumbs up/down as ratings. Going forward thumbs up/down are going to the default settings.

3. Support for local CSS/JS

4. Support for configurable popups (popup on hover or not)

5.  Support for WP-MU and multiple installs in same WP DB

6. Easy upgrade. Just update you SezSho folder with the latest code and configure the new options from the plugins -> SezWho configuration page.

7. Improved support for filtering.

Try it out and let us know?

Automattic, the makers of WordPress, has announced the acquisition of comment replacement service, IntenseDebate (ID). First, let me extend my congratulations to Tom, Jon, Mike and the ID team for whom we have a great deal of respect. Congratulations on joining one of the sharpest group of people in the social media business at Automattic.

News of this acquisition confirms what we at SezWho have known for some time: distributed conversations and their participants are growing in number and significance. We started SezWho with a simple idea taken from the real world: Adding context and reputation to conversations deepens their meaning and enriches relationships.  In the social media world, SezWho’s universal profile and reputation capabilities improve user engagement within communities and across distributed conversations. SezWho helps communities engage participants as it helps participants build and leverage their reputations, expertise, and relationships.

From the beginning our focus has been on participants rather than content. Instead of building a content management and spam filtering tool, we built the best ratings and reputation service available — one that facilitates conversations across all forms of social media and across all social media platforms, including Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress, and Drupal blogs; phpBB bulletin boards; and the array of wikis.

So, how does the acquisition of Intense Debate affect SezWho? The simple answer is “don’t know”. The details on Automattic’s ID integration plans are as yet unknown and a lot will depend on those details. Regardless of what happens next with ID, we at SezWho will continue our commitment to innovation and to serving users across all social media platforms in order to improve online conversations within and across communities.

Are you not recieving the confirmation/registration email from SezWho? It’s possible that you may have an email typo. We have seen quite a few bounces which are clear typos like hptmail.com, <yourdomain>.vom etc.  Drop us a note at support@sezwho.com and we will resend your original email.