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. :)