May 10, 2008
Three Reasons To Question Comments As We Know Them
I am jumping into comment related meme started by Fred Wilson. He made a well articulated case for using Disqus. He mentioned three reasons - Threaded discussion, Shared profile and email convenience. I completely agree on email feature. Its a big missing feature in existing blog conversation design.
Threaded discussion and shared profile features are rapidly losing their value. Shared profile feature management now belongs to big platforms. Facebook, Google and Myspace/Yahoo will manage this better. That will take punch out of reputation management as well.
Threaded discussions are not working mostly, just look at techmeme leaderboard. Most blogs don’t need that. Its a nice to have feature.
Secondly, third party comments don’t work well on mobile handsets. This is a big drawback as we get into more and more mobile experience. I increasingly use iPhone for all blog posts and comments.
Thirdly, and this one is big, Twitter and blog post based response models will finally take over. I will elabore more on the last one in next post. Twitter will disrupt commenting system as we know them.
Now back to tennis.
Update: Just read Don Dodge’s analysis. He mentioned performance concerns as one of the sticking point. I think that will be resolved in near future.
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What is the big deal about all those points ?.
- Threaded discussion : could be interesting , I give “Ye” for that
- 2a, 2b, 3 : Wordpress is already doing all that with their new release.
So where does Disqus brings value?. It is a great effort to become a good commenting system. Oh BTW do I need commenting system that will confuse the heck out of me with all these emails going back and forth?.
Get me a good messaging system rather. May be I do not think like day-n-night blogger mentality.
Different point of view from that post. Interesting to say the least.