SezWho – a quick review of privacy

by keif on May 4, 2008

SezWho is similar to Disqus. They both manage your commentary content and add a certain level of community. SezWho allows gravatars, and let’s you rate the person commenting – creating the ability for someone to say, be a popular commenter and give them a certain “ribbon” if you will, of credibility (or at least likability).

Personally, I’m still not sold on the idea – people connect themselves to their comments via their website (or screen names) and these add an extra layer of complexity. They remove you from handling your own content, allowing someone else to aggregate your data.

Of course, nowadays, we’re breeding a new generation where privacy and sense of ownership are concepts being thrown out the window – so whereas I’m not fond of these services, I see an increasing number of people leaning towards adopting them for this new sense of community.

Tagged as: commenting, disqus, identity, personal transparency, sezwho, viral

  • Keif,

    Thanks for being fair and open ... and for bringing up the interesting issue of privacy.

    Our view is that when somebody participates in a PUBLIC discussion the default should be non-anonymity (as is the case with real-life conversations) but if somebody wanted to be not identitified, that should be able to go anonymous...Either way, by providing the appropriate context and information about the choices a user has made, really helps improve the conversationa and to engage the community. In fact, we have seen the community interactions more than double with SezWho in the picture as more people are commenting and rating with the additional reputational incentives.

    Try out the service and let me know what you think (we fully supported Brian's threaded comments)...Check out

    http://www.howtospoter.com/web-20/blogging-web-20/sezwho-20-on-wordpress-blogs-near-you

    for an example. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

    Thanks, Jitendra
  • Keif,

    Jitendra from SezWho here...Thanks for the mention.

    I want to slightly disagree with you on the SezWho being similar to Disqus...We are infact different in the sense that SezWho is not a comment management service. We infact believe that the comments belong with the blog owners and should be stored with blog content so that there are no -ve SEO/downtime implications etc.

    We are a social context service that provides added context to the conversations across all social sites (forums, blog - both posts and comments, wikis etc.).

    In terms of Privacy, we provide full control to the users over their profiles - they can hide/show what ever elements they want in their profiles or hide it altogether.

    Let me know what you think.

    Thanks, Jitendra
  • Jitendra - Okay, I've got to be honest - I did not give your site a thorough enough review. However, I think it would behoove you to make the FAQ information accessible (and linked from) your blog page.

    That being said, after traversing the FAQ I'm starting to dig it a little more. Having read it more in-depth - I think you should make the opt-out procedure more clear (to avoid the facebook faux pas - even though this is ten times more innocent).

    Thanks for your interest, as well as your adamant defense of your product. I'm going to do some additional research and may add it to my blogs for further testing and analysis.
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