Almost everyone wishes that people could leave comments on their website. Unfortunately, you have to be kind of a badass to actually put in the requisite code to allow and encourage commenting for a page. The way out seems to be writing a javascript library that would allow users to double click and add a comment to any entity on a webpage that had a unique id and class commentable. You could then store the comments on a someone’s central comment server, as well as (optionally) emailing them to the site’s operator. You would have to have a special case where, if the person made the body of the page commentable, you would put an unobtrusive footer or something like that. But a central comment server would be really useful for people.
All that would be required of the web programmer would be to include the javascript, make sure it runs onLoad(), and to add ids and a commentable class to everything that they want to be commented upon. This isn’t great – it does require some work – but it’s way better than forcing everyone to download some random php code. This also puts the power back into the website owner’s hand. There have been schemes where users could leave notes for one another on other peoples’ websites, but there has never been much uptake. I think that it’s because it kind of seems like vandalism if the operator hasn’t specifically requested it.
This get-rich-quick scheme is certified Web2.0 and AJAX and long-tail compliant. The profit would either come from advertising, or from allowing users to pay for advanced features. This isn’t high-bandwidth or high storage stuff here, so it shouldn’t be too hard to turn a profit, and it would be a nice way to allow people who know just enough to make their own websites get feedback on their stuff from their users without forcing their users to overcome the activation energy of actually writing an email. Not only that, but if you allow users to see all conversations, then every commentable thing can support a flamewarconversation!
Every element in the javascript should be end-user stylable with CSS, of course. But the defaults should be set as good as possible. As with all of the ideas here, steal away! I don’t have time to do this, but I would certainly use this service if it were available.
