I ran across an old article today on Mashable.com from October 30, 2007 that I had tagged on delicious, that basically introduced a lot of us to comment platforms.  I remembered reading this at the time and didn’t think a whole lot about it but gave it some consideration because earlier that year I had attended a conference where the hot topic was Web 2.0 and Social Networking. 

I look back now and laugh because I don’t think that I fully understood what a commenting platform did at the time I ready this article, and why I would even want to have one on my website because I already had basic commenting ability turned on inside of wordpress.  A lot has changed in a short period of time and from where I am sitting I think that commenting platforms are going to become their own little “micro social networks” for lack of a better word.  As a lot of you who read my blog may be aware, I devoted a lot of time the last quarter of 2008 toward implementing a facebook connect application on a few of my client websites because I saw an opportunity to finally unite published external content with the Facebook Social Network. 

Since adding Facebook Connect to my personal blog I have seen a dramatic rise in the number of hits and pageviews on this website, and the clients that I have running it are also pretty sold on it as well. 

Now that Facebook has launched Facebook Connect, I think that it has shed some light on the need for a universal commenting platform.  A lot of us in the development community have had high expectations for open sourced OpenID but it has never really picked up any steam in my opinion.  The Microsoft Passport platform is another user authentication process that probably deserves some mention as well, but I don’t see it ever being universally accepted either.  This leaves two alternatives in my opinion, IntenseDebate, which was acquired by Automattic this past year, and Disqus, who recently won the foot race with IntenseDebate to implement Facebook Connect into their application.

In my opinion, Disqus is winning the race simply because they have already embraced Facebook Connect, but never count out the guys at Automattic, I bet that they are in the process right now of implementing Facebook Connect to their product as I write this blog post. 

As I continue to broaden my knowledge of commenting platforms, you can expect that I will have some additional posts related to these add-on products in the near future.  Here is the post from Mashable that I mentioned earlier discussing the two commenting platforms:

Two New Unified Comment Platforms

Coincidentally, two similar products – Disqus and IntenseDebate – have both opened to the public today. Both are competitors to Co.mments, CoComment and others – for a comprehensive review read our article about comment trackers – and both try to establish a centralized platform for users to track their comments across a number of websites, services and blogs.

Disqus aggregates all your comments into a sort of personal forum, which allows users to create new posts and topics not connected to other sites or blogs. This is actually a fantastic idea. Perhaps you’re not interested much in tracking your comments, but if you were able to have everything you wrote on other sites, ever, into one big personal messageboard, why wouldn’t you?

There is, of course, a catch – for this to work, the site you’re commenting on must be Disqus-enabled, which means that Disqus’ rate of success will depend greatly on the willingness of blogs to accept this platform. In practice, it will consist of placing a javascript snippet on your blog: currently, WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger are supported, and Movable Type as well as general OpenID support are in the works.

Now should be the time when I point out differences between the two products, but the fact is, the ideas behind them are very similar. Intense Debate is also a code snippet (a bit more elegant since it’s in the form of a plugin) which anyone with a WordPress, Blogger, or Typepad blog (or just any regular web site) can add to participate. OpenID is supported.

On the commenter side, while there is no “centralized forum” that aggregates your comments, you can use Intense Debate to download all your comments in XML form and do whatever you like with it. Other features include threading, reputation ratings which will be attached to commenter’s identity, and syndication of your comments across all the Intense Debate blogs you comment on.

Both sites have very interesting ideas and seem to leap ahead the current competitors, none of which have ever managed to catch very serious traction. But, the fact that both systems need to be adopted by bloggers first, and commenters second, mean that they have an uphill battle ahead of them. Personally, I haven’t yet found a comment aggregation platform that would fully satisfy all my needs; I hope that at least one of these two products manages to do so.

Disqus And IntenseDebate – Two New Unified Comment Platforms