* Disqus is a discussion service that integrates with Web sites and blogs
The driving force of social media is interaction, and while interaction between a user and a site or service is the foundation (a one to many interaction) it is the interaction between users (many to many) that gives social media momentum. The trick for those services and content owners that want to take advantage of social media is how to stimulate enough user engagement that there’s a reason for the users to interact. One of the best ways to do that is to get discussions going.
You can add a discussion to just about any type of content but the biggest hurdle is how to implement a discussion subsystem. You could rely on the commenting services of a blogging platform but that will constrain your choice of blog. Alternatively you could build your own discussion system and I don’t think I need to explain why that is almost always a sub-optimal choice.
A more appealing solution may be a service called Disqus from Big Head Labs.
Disqus is, as you might guess, a discussion service that integrates with Web sites and blogs providing a threaded view of user comments.
Users can post, read, and rate comments on any Disqus-enabled site and there are widgets for sites to show the top rated discussions, recent comments, and top participants. Disqus also provides spam and troll filtering.
The look and feel of a Disqus discussion is completely customizable and as moderator you can remove unwanted comments or block users as needed. You can also assign other people to act as moderators and you can get discussion updates and create replies by e-mail and mobile devices.
Disqus specifically supports WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, and TypePad as well as integrating with Tumblr and through a code snippet can support pretty much any Web property.
Disqus claims to service some 4,000 blogs, newspapers, and Web sites and if you have registered to use the Disqus system you also register with any site that uses Disqus services.
All services that Disqus currently provides are free and are intended to remain so and they make it clear that your content belongs to you – they even provide export facilities so you can download any discussions you own. There’s even an API that lets you get a count and the content of posts in a thread, retrieve user profiles, etc.
This is a powerful idea and even though the service is relatively young (it launched in November 2007) it has all the hallmarks of success: A growing population of users, good presentation and documentation, and its free. This is one to watch. And discuss.
