Disqus is a comment board which can be implanted into basically any website (it's at the bottom of this post for example). It allows for multi-tiered comments, which encourages thorough discussion and keeps each conversation separate. It also shows 'reactions' - places where the web has mentioned the page in question. But that's all before we even touch on the whole standardisation theme.
The first major advantage of a universal (well, increasingly ubiquitous at least) comment system is that our profiles are similarly consistent - we don't have to hand out our email addresses to every page we ever land on, we can identify people we've met before on another site, and we don't have to manage hundreds of accounts. Lovely.
The second big bonus is that our activity can be tracked across the cloud - for example, we ourselves can see where we've been and who's responded to us (or liked our comments) from one dashboard at disqus.com. We can also follow other commenters - and that's where the line between this paragraph and the last blur. Finally, the universal format means comments on disqus can easily be ported across websites, and that cloud apps have an easier time keeping up because they only have to worry about one API.
Think about this long and hard - disqus makes commenting much closer to what it's like in real life. We talk to each other in the same way whether we're at a college lecture or a rock concert. We remember things people have said in one place in our brain, and don't have to process them to cross-reference. We recognise people around us no matter the context because their name and their face stay the same. Disqus are doing a great thing for the web - they are making it more life-like. Good for them.
No comments:
Post a Comment