What a difference (less than) two years make! Here I was complaining about losing half the conversation …. two months later three comment tracking services debuted: coComment , MyComments and co.mments. Of these three, coComment developed decent traction.
Fast forward a year or so, and we have an abundance of comment tracking / conversational tools: TechCrunch just announced Intense Debate:
…a souped-up blog commenting system that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation.
TechCrunch mentions JS-Kit, SezWho, and Tangler as competitors. But on the very same day Fred Wilson announced another commenting system:
I am lending a new startup a hand by letting them showcase their new comment system on this blog.
I don’t know how much I am supposed to say about them, so I’ll stay silent on them for now.
Based on some similarities (at least at first glance) I thought it was Intense Debate skinned somewhat differently – but after all, there was a little logo leading to Disqus: another commenting/ conversation system.
Choices, choices … what’s a poor blogger to do?
Update: I’ve met – online – Josh from Intense Debate and Daniel from Disqus. The dilemma still stands (hm, should I say I’m intensely debating which one to try ;-)) but in the meantime I’ve found this video on Daniel’s blog. It’s absolutely off-topic, and absolutely worth watching (till the very end, or you’ll miss the point):
Implementing DISQUS
Quick note: I’m in the process of implementing DISQUS now. (Thanks for the help, Daniel!) Thousands of comments are being imported, but they don’t show under the relevant posts yet. Also, DISQUS labeled a few hundred comments as spam – I need to manually comb through those.
So if you commented here before and don’t see your comment now – apologies, hope to sort this out soon.
Update (1/29): Pre-DISQUS comments are in the system but they don’t show for some reason. Bear with me for a while – either we’ll have a fix or I’m removing DISQUS soon.
Update #2: Removed DISQUS, due to ongoing SPAM trouble. I may write more on this one day…