Comment portability

I know that the way comments and content interact is something Fred Wilson has written about extensively over the past few years, and companies like Disqus and IntenseDebate have been working on solutions to this set of problems for a while.

For a long time I have felt that splitting my content from the native comment systems within WordPress would be a bad idea. Mostly this is because Google was such a big driver of traffic that I wanted to make sure Google considered all of those comments to be part of the actual blog post page, so that I would get the resulting traffic.

But methods of content discovery have changed dramatically over the past few years, at least for me. I find very little content via Google anymore (mostly I find ways to fix programming errors), and instead do most of my reading by following links from a core set of blogs and news sources.

Also, I think that identity on the web has changed dramatically over the past few years. Facebook has done such an incredible job of making sure their users are all real people that it has started to become the de facto ID-card of the internet. I use it as login to a number of new web tools, and it becomes easier every day to identify someone online.

So I’ve started to care a lot less about my blog posts and my content being read on my own site. These posts are imported to Facebook, and more often than not, Facebook is where the interesting discussion happens in the comments, not here. Do the people reading it know it comes from me? Yes.

What I would love is a way for these comments to be portable, and travel with the content of my blog post wherever it goes. If someone leaves a comment on Facebook, I would like it to appear on this blog as well. If Mark Suster posts to TechCrunch, and then re-posts it to his own blog, the comments should all be part of the same thread across both sites.

It’s a hard problem to solve, because content providers all across the internet have to opt-in to any shared system by hosting some of their code, and then the system has to be smart enough to recognize when it’s looking at the same post in a different location (or, in the short term, that can be flagged by the author or the audience, and existing comments can be combined).

Disqus has been doing a good job of getting their comment system widely into use across many popular blogs, but I think Facebook is best positioned to do this.

They are the only ones who can manage the comments inside their own platform, and their code, logins, and enhancements are already widely adopted around the web at large. I have already seen sites where I have the option to just log in with Facebook to comment; why not have a bit of Facebook code pulling all of those comments together?