Disqus to Improve Blog Commenting
Y Combinator startup Disqus will soon begin public testing of their interactive blog commenting service. Disqus allows users to make an account to manage their commenting and even create a forum of their own. But the real draw of Disqus is the ability for users to easily utilize the Disqus commenting system on their own blog or other such website.
Disqus is about enhancing online discussion. We are starting with a better comment system for your blog, backed and synced with your own dedicated forum.
Discussion across blogs should be better and we’ll have some cool things to address this.
The Disqus commenting engine requires that you insert some code on your site and it loads JavaScript for features like threaded commenting with voting (think Digg comments). In addition, the comments are mirrored on the Disqus website in the form of their forum, with each of your blog posts having its own automatically created thread. The idea is that people will begin using this on many blogs and Disqus users can track their comments and comments of others they wish to follow, directly from the Disqus forum view.
Disqus takes over the blog commenting system that comes with your WordPress or other blog and comments posted by users are stored and retrieved from Disqus themselves. As such, comments are not put into your database so if you should ever want to revert to a non-Disqus state you won’t have any comments from the period you were using Disqus. However, I have talked to Disqus employee Daniel Ha about this and I’m sure they will have an export/comments migration solution eventually.
Disqus could end up being a great solution for sites that receive thousands of comments per post where the database writes are too intensive to run on a single server and outsourcing the commenting system is probably a good idea. Obviously the target audience is just the regular blogger looking to add some convenience and flair to the typically mundane commenting and reader interaction process. On the other hand, I will avoid Disqus as I see it as another JS file my site has to load and I prefer having most things fast and local; that’s just me.
What are your thoughts on Disqus? Would you give it a try when it goes public?
Update from Disqus:
Couple things:
- Yup, migration is coming.
- WordPress and MoveableType plugins won’t be a JavaScript pull. Being a
hosted plugin allows us to give the publisher (you) full control of the
style, etc.Another big plus? The comments will also be rendered on your page, not just
pulled with JS. Indexable and all. :)
My question is, which one of these comment systems do we settle on. I’ve been using co-comment for a few months, is this one better? Do I switch? Which one will benefit my readers more? There are so many services that claim to tie my site in with a wider community - mybloglog etc. When does it end?
I like the idea of centralised comments, but I’m really not keen on handing them over completely to a third party. Until that gets sorted, I’m not even vaguely interested. If they do fix it, I might be interested in the comment rating system that doesn’t exist in co-comment.
Any thoughts on how this stacks up to Intense Debate?
Matt could do something like that and run it on Wordpress.com. Then of course your limited to only Wordpress sites but its an idea.
I’ve really been wondering why you can’t go to blogname.com/comments and see the entire site as a forum with each blog post being a subject.
I don’t think it would be hard at all to do as a plugin or part of the WordPress core. It would kind of be like if edit-comments.php was public.
Well I might consider it since cocomments redesigned and relaunched everything seems so complicated and slow I liked the previous version better.
@Engtech thats are really cool idea.
You know Google will be jumping on this bandwagon soon. They’re anxiously awaiting which web2.0 startup gains the most user base before buying them out. Then they’ll add it as a feature, most likely “Comment History.” You’ll then be able to search Google for other comments. Any takers?
@pete
@pete
Josh from Intense Debate here. There are some obvious similarities between Disqus and ID. Many of the things they plan on doing are things we already do. We have some enormous things we are working on at ID that will separate us with our competitors by leaps and bounds.
Great post! coComment provides all the bells and whistles that recently launched commenting systems provide, but what differentiates the tool in my mind is the traction the company already has more than 500K users, which means lots of great content and conversations for people to discover.
coComment is the first tool on the market and just launched a new version, V2 Beta. In this version, coComment tries to make conversations on the web as easy as talking to people in real life. People can stay connected, easily discover great conversations and share them with friends and the community. We welcome any feedback and comments from users, so feel free to e-mail me at kristina@cocomment.com anytime. Thanks! Kristina from coComment
I may give it a try when I revamp one of my sites. Not looking to be a major hub in the world, but just get a chance to write a little bit more.
Thanks for the post, Paul(for the whole blog, actually). I’m shamelessly using your site for new ideas. It’s great to have someone out there looking at all the things I’m missing due to wearing too many hats at too many places.
Hi All!
You may want to check out JS-Kit Comments
They are Easy to install & customize and fully support SPAM filtering,
pre and post moderation, RSS, indexing by Google, on an on….
Be Well,
Khris
JS-Kit
http://www.js-kit.com