Disqus "Out Opened" My Comments!
I have previously been critical of Disqus, the blog commenting platform. My main criticism of the platform is the inability to store comment data on my own servers granting Disqus complete ownership of my site’s comment data. Yesterday I watched an interview between Robert Scoble and the Disqus CEO in which he stated that they have plans to make changes which give the ownership back to the blog owners.
Over the past few days I have been spending more time experimenting with FriendFeed given Twitter’s downtime. The service has been growing on me and one thing that I’ve noticed is that when people post a comment on my blog it doesn’t show up in FriendFeed but when they post a comment on Disqus it does because Disqus is a supported service on the site. While I won’t spend time discussing why I now use FriendFeed in this post, the one thing I will say is that I enjoy conversing with this small hyper-connected group of individuals who I barely know aside from the comments we share on a daily basis.
Not having peoples’ comments show up in FriendFeed means a lost opportunity for promotion of my site. As such I am slowly being forced into integrating Disqus into my blog. While I haven’t made the change yet, I’m extremely likely to make the shift when the new version of the platform is released. While FriendFeed is one of the few sites that provide support for Disqus postings, my guess is that this trend will continue and we could soon see integration on sites like Facebook which also provide newsfeed functionality.
While Disqus is still an extremely early-stage service, it appears that they are gaining substantial traction and slowly one blog after the other that I use is integrating it into their site. I’m being a resistor to change because I think it will help improve the service for the time being. Additionally, the first version of a product tends to have a number of flaws (take the iPhone for example).
The most interesting thing about Disqus is that the benefits could soon outweigh the cons and the company will have succeeded in “out opening” my blog comments. It’s similar to the battle taking place between OpenSocial and Facebook but on a much smaller scale. Disqus is growing one blog at a time rather than one social network at a time. I can envision similar functionality from utilities on Facebook and other social networks including image uploading and wall postings.
The second that those features are opened on social networks is the exact moment that FriendFeed will have “out opened” social networks but that conversation should be saved for another time. For now, I have come to realize that the Disqus will soon succeed at forcing me on to their platform. I have no other option.
