VentureBeat

It’s becoming increasingly hard to keep track of discussions scattered across the web. That’s what a startup called uberVU hopes to change. It looks at sites like Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, and many others, and aggregates the comments related to a single URL (for example, a blog post). That way, it’s possible to see the entire conversation about, say, one of my posts in a single thread, regardless of where the comments were made. And now, with the release of the London- and Bucharest-based startup’s application programming interface (API), publishers can bring uberVU aggregation back to their own sites.

It’s easy to see why this API could be a very big deal for uberVU and its users. The company’s existing service, where publishers can go to the uberVU site to see and respond to all their comments in one place, was already useful, but it just served publishers and writers like me, not our readers. Now, however, a site like VentureBeat can use the API to publish all of those comments in our comments threads. Some services, such as FriendFeed and Facebook Connect, already offer ways to connect social sites with comment threads, but uberVU integrates a wide range of services. This makes the original article (rather than a link on, say, FriendFeed, or on Digg) the center of the conversation.

For now, developers can access the API for free as long as they don’t make more than 5,000 requests per day and are using it for non-commercial purposes. The API infrastructure is handled by Mashery. UberVU has already integrated with Mashable and Disqus, the commenting service that we use for VentureBeat’s comments. Disqus’ Daniel Ha (no relation to me) says uberVU is now live for any Disqus site that wants to enable the feature.

The company has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

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Tags: co:ubervu