Disqus Poised to Rule the World of Blog Comments
Disqus, an external blog-commenting system that works with most common blogging tools, has launched a new version that includes local comment storage for WordPress, a more powerful API and an updated look for the Disqus site.
If you haven’t encountered Disqus before, the service is a kind of distributed commenting system that you can add to most blogging software via some simple cut-and-paste JavaScript.
In addition to the usual commenting tools offered by most blogging software, Discus allows people to rate comments, create profiles and follow other commenters through the Disqus site (or via RSS). The one thing that sets Disqus apart from other similar systems is there’s no need for your users to register — Disqus allows anonymous comments.
The big news in the new version Disqus is the WordPress plugin which allows you to automatically sync any Disqus comments back to your local WordPress database. Although the comments on your site will still be served by Disqus, should you ever decide to stop using Disqus you won’t lose any existing comments.
Also part of the WordPress plugin is the ability to manage comments from within the WordPress dashboard. The Disqus blog also claims that search engines will be able to index comments, which is often seen as drawback to JavaScript commenting systems like Disqus. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any details on how the comments are exposed to Google and the like.
Also not yet detailed is the new Disqus API. The Disqus blog claims that the WordPress plugin uses the new API, so, in theory anyway, it may be possible to create your own comment-syncing system for other blog-publishing platforms.
The idea of using a distributed commenting system like Disqus hasn’t caught on with many users due to concerns about local backups and Google indexing, but with its new version Disqus may be poised to take the comment world by storm.
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