Zpeech is a new service that does an interesting take on website comments/reviews. It adds a floating message board (called zpeechboard) to every and any web site, where you can read other people’s comments and comment on the site itself. How does it do that? Simple - add zpeech.com/ in front of an URL, and the browser will open a live webpage identical to its standard appearance, with the addition of the zpeechboard. Anyone can read the comments, but only registered users can add new comments.

Example? www.zpeech.com/franticindustries.com enables you to comment on this site. The service is very new, so there aren’t many comments yet - for the biggest discussion yet go to www.zpeech.com/google.com.

Zpeech’s business model seems to be AdSense, as the zpeechboard has a small (and unobtrusive) AdSense box inside of it. I don’t see the costs of developing and maintaining Zpeech as really high, so a simple advertising model might work for them.

There are many things to like about Zpeech. First, its simplicity. You don’t have to register to use it; you only have to remember one word - zpeech - to be able to use it on any computer, as you can simple add URLs to zpeech.com/, however if you’re not keen on typing you can do it via the available bookmarklet, too. Furthermore, I like the idea of a disjointed message board for the entire web, it’s one of those ideas that are really simple yet quite usable. The zpeechboard looks nice, works well, and it can be resized, maximized and minimized, which means it won’t get in your way while you’re actually browsing the site.

As far as bad sides go, it’s already quite obvious that the little zpeechboard will very soon become cluttered, and after a couple of pages of comments probably completely unusable. Simplicity works up to a certain degree, but then some organizational features must take over, otherwise it will become a mess. Also, while commenting on sites is nice, it’s basically all you can do with Zpeech. The service is begging for more options. My proposition to the authors is this: the next feature to add to Zpeech should be voting on comments, and threshold to hide the buried comments, just like on Digg. This will greatly add to the actual usefulness of the comments and it will hide the clutter.

Zpeech is a fun little service, but it’s hard to predict if it’s really going to raise a great deal of interest or not. It also has a fair share of competitors, one that springs to mind is Gabbly which offers a disjointed chat board instead of a message board. It’s nicely done, has a zero learning curve, and it works well, but I think it needs a couple more killer features to become really useful.