Laurie Meadoff, co-founder of the Qwidget’s parent company Chat Ventures, was featured in a slideshow on businessweek.com yesterday.  The slideshow accompanied an article about the Springboard VC Forum, a showcase for women-owned businesses in which we participated last week.  The Forum was great.  We were all really inspired by the work of the incredible women entrepreneurs and were honored to be showcasing the Qwidget.

I spent most of the day in the lobby giving quick demos to other entrepreneurs and potential future users of the Qwidget.  If you follow me on Twitter, you’d have known that already.

We’re excited that we’re already getting some good coverage of our company and our product before we even launch it.  That being said, expect to see the Qwidget working on this blog in the coming days.

I’m very excited to announce that today we are launching the new Qwidget website and logo.  I am tempted to explain all the reasons that I think our logo totally rocks and why it perfectly represents the Qwidget.  However, a logo should make a statement without the impassioned backing of the product manager, so I’m going to be quiet and let it do the talking.

The logo was designed by the talented designer (and my very good friend) Erin Kilkenny whose work can be found here.  Both the Qwidget blog and the main Qwidget.com site were done by another very talented web designer Marco Castro.  His work is here. [Ed. note: Ever the honorable designer, Marco asked me to point out that Erin played very strong role in coming up with the concept for the site design which Marco then refined and implemented.]

With the launch of qwidget.com, we are revealing the actual functionality of the Qwidget - what it does, how it does it and how it can help you as a blogger generate conversations on your blog.  For a complete run through on all of that, check out the feature tour.  You can also get a quick sense from the graphic below, which also appears on the main qwidget.com site.  Also, be sure to check out the video demo that I put together for the main site.  And please leave feedback here.  I plan on updating it and revising it according to feedback I get here.

In the coming days, we will be putting the Qwidget up on this blog so you can test out the features.  And shortly after that, we’ll be releasing it to our initial group of beta testers.  If you’re interested in joining that group, please sign up here.

I have been thinking a lot about the commentosphere recently.  I’ve delved into the world a bit as well, leaving a handful of comments on my favorite blogs.  But I keep running into the same problems.  I would consider myself a fairly fanatical blog reader, twitter user, and a social media addict in general.  But I’m a user at heart.  A reader.  I have a lot of opinions and I love talking about them.  But I often feel left out of conversations on blogs - even when I know as much about what everyone is talking about as anyone else.  Why don’t I participate more?  Here are three reasons:

1. Comment conversations are totally disorganized with no clear format or structure. There is no clear entry point for casual users like me.  What should my comment be about?  The post?  A related article I read?  A response to a previous comment?  Do I need to read all the previous comments before leaving mine?  Or can I just comment away despite the fact that someone else might have said/asked the same exact thing?
2. Comment sections tend to be dominated either by trolls or power users who comment a LOT.  The presence of trolls tells me: “don’t bother.”  And the power user dominance says: “Do you really belong in this conversation?” Sometimes I don’t know.
3. There is no mechanism to connect conversations across articles. As a result each article or blog post is an island unto itself with dialogues that have a short shelf life.  Which again makes the investment of time not worth it when I’m not sure if I really want to come back to that post to comment again.

To be clear, people that do leave comments often get an enormous amount of satisfaction out of it.  But it seems to me that you need to make a certain minimum level of commitment before you start seeing benefits like fulfilling conversations, new friends, etc.  And that minimum level of commitment is simply way too high for an enormous majority of web users.

That’s why we are building the qwidget: to unleash the vast human desire to communicate among casual users that has been stifled by the problems unique to commenting.

Here’s a great story from the annals of customer service.  My friend Fady Hadid is a young Iraqi filmmaker with whom I worked on Hometown Baghdad.  After working on that documentary in Baghdad, he came to the US to study film.  At the same time, many of his friends were scattering around the world as they rushed to escape the civil war in Iraq.  He found himself desperately needing a way to stay in touch with his friends and to find old ones who left without providing a way to stay in touch.  So he did what everyone does when they want to find someone who they’ve lost touch with: he turned to Facebook.  But alas, there was no network for the University of Baghdad.  So Fady went on a mission to get one added. Here is the email chain between Fady and Facebook customer service.

From: Facebook Support
Date: Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 11:44 AM
To: Fady

Hi,

The Facebook Team has received your inquiry. We should get back to you soon. In the meantime, we encourage you to review our Help page (http://www.facebook.com/help.php).  There, you’ll find answers to many common questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

The Facebook Team

———-
From: Facebook Support
Date: Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 11:21 PM
To: Fady


Hi,

We can look into this, but for security reasons we need you to respond to this email from your school email address.  Also, please write your email address in the subject line and include all of our previous correspondence so that we can refer to your original inquiry.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

XXXX
User Operations
Facebook
———-
From: Fady
Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 4:57 PM
To: Facebook Support


Hi XXXX,

Unfortunately we don’t really have email account for University of Baghdad (or Baghdad University for that matter) because we never had such infrastructure, but I wrote an email just because it was needed. I wished if there was a network for our university’s students and alumni anyway, because I am sure we are so many on Facebook. And sorry for the inconvenience.

Best,
Fady

———-
From: Facebook Support
Date: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 5:40 PM
To: Fady


Hi Fady,

We’re hoping to add your school.  In order to do so, we’ll need you to reply to this email with the information below.  Please be aware that we only support schools that are still in existence and that we do not support elementary, middle, or junior high schools.

1) Does your school supply email addresses to students?  Please respond “Yes” or “No.”  If yes, you must respond to this email from your school email address in order for us to add your school.

2) Please tell us your:

Full Name of your School
City
State/Country
School’s website
To:XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Subject: Re: I Can’t Add a College Network

———-
From: Fady
Date: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 5:49 PM
To: Facebook Support

Hi XXX,

Thank you so much for your quick response. Yes it is a university and it still exists. It is actually the biggest and the most major university in Iraq. Unfortunately it doesn’t have an electronic infrastructure so it doesn’t provide emails and there’s no official website (that I know of). Here are my answers:

1. No.

2. University of Baghdad
Baghdad
Iraq
www.uob.edu.iq (I’m not sure if this is the official site - it’s still under construction too)

Thank you so much and keep up the great work!

Best,
Fady
———-
From: Facebook Support
Date: Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 3:46 PM
To: Fady


Hi Fady,

I have made note of your request.  We hope to add it as part of our next network expansion.  Sorry in advance for any delay. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Next thing Fady knew, there was a network for the University.  Despite the facts that there was no functioning website for the school, there were no school email addresses and Facebook was probably unable to contact the University to confirm what Fady told them. Only 385 students have joined the network so far but he is confident that more will eventually find it.  I don’t want to overestimate the importance of having a network for your college, but it certainly sends a warm, inclusive message to these Iraqi students.  They belong here as much as Mark’s Harvard buddies.

Note: I have obviously removed some names and email address from this exchange.

Phew….Chrome renders the Qwidget blog just fine.