To stay competitive in the rapidly evolving world of social media, JS-Kit, like all young Internet companies, must aggressively innovate to provide our customers with world class products.

Echo was born in this spirit.

The incredible wave of positive attention towards Echo, its explosive growth, and rapid adoption by tier one publishers &  bloggers shows that we hit the mark.  As Robert Scoble said of Echo, “Blogging is back!”

Our innovations of hyper-distribution, binding multiple social identities together, re-assembly of the global conversation, all housed in a real-time architecture, do come with costs.  These costs come in the form of changes that impact customers of our legacy Comment, Ratings, & Polls services.

Today we are announcing the end-of-life of our “Wire Frame” and “Smooth Grey” skin for Comments and the discontinuation of our Ratings & Polls services.  All Comment customers will automatically be upgraded to the Echo skin.  All settings, administrative controls, and the comments themselves are inherited by Echo.

One can reasonably ask “What’s the big deal with keeping a few old templates around?  They look and work great!”, or, “Why would one of the world’s top Ratings companies kill its service?”

The answers are optimization & focus.

A major issue is the Fibonacci-esq need to test and support each new feature against outdated skins.  Strategically, these costs would sap our ability to innovate and would ultimately become an ever increasing weight on the company that would exhaust our resources.  More practically, the skins do not support our newest innovations.

Echo heralded the “Death of Comments” because it completely supplanted its functionality and addressed the current state of the market by bringing into balance engagement between publishers and social networks.  As its heavy sword severed the head of Comments its momentum, unfortunately, carried through to the heart of Ratings and Polls.

By this metaphor I mean that a young company can ride only one really big wave and, for us, that wave is Echo.  We believe these decisions will benefit publishers and their visitor immediately from our deep thought and broad experience in optimizing the engagement experience and for the long haul as 100% of the companies resources are laser focused on improving Echo.

For customers that are impacted by these decisions we offer:

• 90 day continuation of the Ratings & Polls services so existing customers can access their data and find a suitable alternative (11/15/2009)
• 90 day continuation of Wire Frame & Smooth Grey so existing customers can prepare for the upgrade (11/15/2009)
• For prepaid subscriptions: 100% refund of the remainder of the subscription for customers that do not wish to upgrade
• Support for sites that need assistance upgrading
• Echo colors & fonts are fully customizable using a new and improved CSS class structure

We appreciate the patience and support our customers and are extremely excited by the possibilities that Echo presents to us all!

Khris Loux, Co-Founder & CEO
@khrisloux