The second premise of Engag.io is to allow a commenter to extract value from their commenting activity. That value is derived from the potential relationships that are developed over time by commenting with one another.

Although the social web has been shadowed by linking and sharing activity, commenting online is one of the strongest social media signal. It’s stronger than liking and sharing,- yet we weren’t able to systematically see the relationships from these conversations, until Engag.io came along.

Engag.io tracks the people you’re interacting with, and therefore is building an Interaction Graph for you, implicitely, and accurately. Fred Wilson described Engag.io as an io channel for social engagement in an exclusive alpha launch post.

The Social Interaction Graph we’re building is accurate because you can’t fake engagement. It’s implicit because you don’t have to change your activity, i.e. you comment as you normally would.

Here’s the flow Engagio is based on:

Community—>Comments—>Conversations—>Connections—>Content—>Contact 

You go to the communities you care about, you comment, you make conversations, you meet connections, you discover new content & learn about your connections, you contact these connections.

The magic reveals itself as we tie the six C’s together and use the underlying data to give you a much needed visibility into your social engagement activity. After all, “the handful of communities that have dynamic conversations are still uniquely separated from each other”, as Arnold Waldstein astutely observed in his blog post Conversational Rant. But with Engag.io, we’re changing this paradigm and integrating your conversations in a smart way.

Why is this important? Because online advocacy is on the rise and an increasing number of users are engaging online and debating the issues that matter to them, whether business, technology, politics, lifestyle or hobbies related. Vibrant online communities are the future of web.

Not only has the quantity of comments increased, but so has the quality of comments to the point where the value of comments is often greater than the value of the post or article. So, why not focus on the parts that have the most value- the conversations and the people behind them. 

Start Engaging! 

Engagio’s first premise is about its utility factor- the utility of seeing all of your commenting activity in one place.

As engaged users, we all comment in various places. But to keep up, we need to either re-visit these sites, or receive multiple email notifications when a reply has been posted. So, why not borrow the Gmail analogy and have a tool that collects all of your comments as messages in an Inbox format? Then, when you open the message, you will see the conversation threads inside. And you can reply from there. That’s where Engagio starts, but not where it ends.

Connecting your Networks and Commenting Systems
We started with 7 social networks/commenting systems: Disqus, Facebook Comments and Wall, Google+, Twitter, Foursquare checkins, Tumblr (write only), and Hacker News (read only). Just like email, there’s an Inbox folder, and there’s a Sent folder. Your comments/replies are collected in the Sent folder. And when someone responds to one of your comments or replies, the message line turns bold (Unread), until you read it or open it. 

We believe that having a universal Conversation Inbox could become a daily time saver.It will save you time because you don’t have to check the multiple source sites where you have placed your comments. And you can for example focus on replies first, before you get to other commenting.

You don’t have to use the Engagio Inbox exclusively. You can also comment normally on the native sites, or via email, and we will continue to record your commenting activity, therefore keeping your Inbox and Sent folder up to date. Suddenly, you’ll be accumulating all these conversation in one place, giving you a new type of visibility into your content across the various commenting communities. 

How about “Searching your comments”?

Search your comments
Yes, you can search your comments and content around your comments in the conversation threads that you participate in by running a simple text search. The novelty we have introduced is in displaying the results: we show you the top users that are participating in the comment threads that match your search queries. Great way to discover where the smart conversations are, and the smart people behind them!

Share your comments
Social sharing is part of this experience, and we have taken it a step further. Not only can you re-share your comments, but also any comment that appears in the threads that you’re participating in. This makes it easy to quote powerful comments from your friends and users you interact with during the online conversations. You can share into up to 3 networks simultaneously, in one click: Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. 

How does this compare to existing commenting solutions? Our vision is very user-centric whereas other commenting systems are primarily site owner-centric, although some of them such as Disqus offer some user-centric features via a Dashboard. We think we have taken commenting user-centricity further than anyone else. And all commenting systems whether third-party or native ones are our partners. We depend on them, but we add value for the end-user on top of their offerings. 

In the next post, I will cover the second most powerful feature of Engagio: allowing you to track and manage the people you interact with during your commenting.

Follow us on Twitter at @engagio.