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Comment Portability: The Commenting Standard of the Future

Disqus, IntenseDebate, and SezWho. 3 commenting systems that currently don’t work together, but here’s how they could.

I think it’s possible for the services to come together and develop a standard for commenting systems (as suggested by Dave Stanley of Shyftr). This standard would provide a framework for updating comments across the blog, commenting systems, and third-party services (like FriendFeed or Shyftr).

Of course this also requires input and cooperation from these third-party services for this to really work. The ultimate goal: distributed conversations with aggregated discussions.

What future implications do you think this will have on how you blog and participate in discussions?

This entry was posted by Shey on July 6, 2008 at 12:00 pm, and is filed under Blogging, Social Media. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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http://shegeeks.net Corvida

I don’t think services want to do this. They’re all competitors. Why would they link up with one another?
http://www.sheysmith.com Shey

I think it’s in the best interest for all of the 3 commenting systems:

1) Makes them more attractive to blogs
2) Opens the door for other third-party services to use them as well

Yes, in a sense they are all competitors, but they all have their individual strengths. This will give them a chance to really dive into their niches by investing in the industry as a whole.
http://shegeeks.net Corvida

On an entirely different note, I tried to give your reply a point and for some reason I can’t.
http://www.sheysmith.com Shey

I don’t think Disqus allows you to give points to replies. Replies to your own comment that is
http://www.svartling.net/ svartling

Great idea.
Yuvi Panda

They should.

Hope they will.

Good Call.
http://www.toluu.com/betainvite calebelston

We can only hope we see something like this soon. hComment
http://metablogging.gr nikan

I had a similar idea when I heard of identi.ca: we can use federated microblogging as blog commenting system. That would bring the conversation back to the blogs and enrich them with the microblogging communities. All these, provided there is a standard for microblogging services to talk to each other, understand trackbacks etc.
In any case, I am a proponent of the idea of unified commenting.
http://www.sheysmith.com Shey

Thanks Caleb,

Any plans to add any kind of commenting to Toluu or would that overcomplicate the service?
http://www.toluu.com/betainvite calebelston

Not in our current plans, but things can always change. We always think about adding features that will give the most value to the most users. At some point comments about a blog may be helpful in deciding if a blog is worth your time.
http://regulargeek.com/ robdiana

actually, there has been talk of getting a standard for comments together by the various sites. It is not entirely formalized yet, but hopefully it can get off the ground.
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http://intensedebate.com Michael Koenig

Shey, Corvida – I hope you don’t mind me jumping in here. This is one of our goals at IntenseDebate. We get that having your content spread across a ton of different services is a pain. It would be awesome if all of your content was in one place regardless of which service you use to post it. This topic is definitely on our minds.

This is one of the goals of our FriendFeed integration. We’re striving to give you the tools to aggregate your content in cooperation with other 3rd party services so that you’re comments are available regardless of which service you use to post it. Whether this is something that we do in-house or something that we work on with our good friends over at Gnip (http://gnnipcentral.com) is still getting hashed out. BTW – check out GNIP. They just launched last week and we’re extremely excited about our partnership with our good buddies down the street from us. Keep an eye on them…they’re going to change everything.

It should be pretty exciting to see the future of content aggregation. We’ll get there!

Cheers,
Michael Koenig
IntenseDebate
http://www.sheysmith.com Shey

Don’t mind at all Michael, thanks for your input.

Just to correct your URL: http://www.gnipcentral.com/

Keep up the great work
http://vrypan.net/ vrypan

It should be as easy as adding a trackback URL to the comment field (or even, trying to trackback the “homepage” URL most comment forms already have).

This way, any post I leave anywhere will be also posted back to my own, personal, “comment tracking system”, or even integrated in my blog, as posts. Open, simple, portable and most parts are already implemented in various programming languages.
http://intensedebate.com Michael Koenig

Thanks Shey (and thanks for correcting my link…fat finger slip, these things happen).
http://www.sheysmith.com Shey

On an unrelated note, I’m now getting emails from ID whenever someone posts an FF comment on my blog . How do I disable that just for the FF comments?
http://intensedebate.com Michael Koenig

Thanks for letting me know Shey. In your IntenseDebate profile (http://intensedebate.com/editprofile) have you selected the “Pull in comments made on my blog posts in FriendFeed” check box?
http://www.sheysmith.com Shey

No, it’s not selected.
http://intensedebate.com Michael Koenig

Ok. thanks Shey. I’ll get to the bottom of this. I’ll keep you posted.

Sorry about taking over your comment section here. I’m more than willing to keep the conversation going here (especially to keep anyone interested in the loop, since it pertains to comment portability), but I’d completely understand if you’d prefer to move this conversation from your blog to email in order to spare your readers. Please let me know and feel free to email.
http://intensedebate.com Michael Koenig

An update for anyone interested: we’ve identified why Shey was receiving these email notifications and have corrected the issue.
http://www.willbrownonline.com/ WillBrown

Nice post, Shey.
I lack of communication between the different services is keeping me from fully embracing them at this time. I’m trying out Disqus on my personal blog, but have not moved all my blogs and podcasts to it yet.
We’ll see.
http://www.sheysmith.com Shey

Thanks Will,

I think there’s a lot of benefit to using Disqus and other commenting systems. Just be sure to look at the pros and cons. Personally, I’ve found it increases the amount of discussion I get on my posts.
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http://www.ankershop.ru Darren

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