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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. if you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: LiveFyre

Quick Pitch: LiveFyre makes comments real-time and more interactive.

Genius idea: Putting social media conversations surrounding a web page back on the publisher’s site.

Comments, Jordan Kretchmer believes, missed the transition to the social web.

“I looked at the space of how conversations were happening online,” Kretchmer says, “and I saw that the social web had taken interactions between people to a new level, where interactions on publishers hadn’t changed.”

LiveFyre, the company he founded, hopes to help comments catch up. It launched in 2009 with a freemium product that makes comments real-time and integrated with social media. more than 15,000 sites now use it for comments. some are small blogs that use the product free. Others are large publications like The Sun that pay based on their size.

Most, according to LiveFyre, have seen the number of comments on their sites increase. Publishing network BlogHer, for instance, has had its number of average monthly comments shoot from 3,500 to 10,000 in the two months since it started using the product.

With a new update that the site launched Tuesday, that number should increase even more. the update, “SocialSync,” pulls social media conversations surrounding posts and articles back to the comments section. if someone shares a link to an article through a Twitter stream, for instance, the comment that person adds to that tweet will show up in the article’s comments section. when someone replies to that tweet, the reply will also be posted.

“There’s a huge shift from publishers feeling like they should outsource the community to Facebook and Twitter to realizing that there’s a ton of value in building a community yourself,” Kretchmer says. “[People who post comments to social networks that aren't included in a site's own comments] use your site as a jumping-off point, but don’t have a lot of reason to come back to it.”

LiveFyre uses semantic analysis to make sure it’s not reposting the same message over and over again as it’s retweeted, and its algorithms follow links that come directly from the web page to pull in the most relevant comments. SocialSync also allows users to tag friends from Twitter and Facebook in their comments.

From a business perspective, SocialSync’s most important contribution to the product might be to further distinguish it from its largest competitor Disqus, which also allows user to share directly to Facebook and Twitter and offers notifications to commenters when they receive responses.

Ultimately, however, LiveFyre realizes that increasing the quantity of comments isn’t enough. Publishers don’t just want comments, they want comments worth reading. Kretchmer says his startup’s next new feature will create some sort of “moderation automation.” the response to a commenter’s comments, for instance, could be tracked over time to sort out who is likely to provide value to the community.

“It’s more about automatically showing comments of higher quality than minimizing comments that are lower quality,” he says.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hiob

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. there are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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