Disqus Adds FriendFeed Integration
A couple days ago Disqus (one of our portfolio companies) announced that they had added FriendFeed integration. This is a feature I've wanted for basically the past year and I am thrilled that they've been able to work with FriendFeed to make this happen.
There are two or three steps. The first one (the or step) is adding your blog's feed to FriendFeed. I've had my feed there for the past year so that was not a necessary step for me. Then you go to the account services page in disqus and add the FriendFeed service, and finally you add FriendFeed comments in the disqus administration panel. It took me about a minute to do the whole thing.
For AVC community members, there are two benefits. The first is if you leave a comment in FriendFeed, it will show up on this blog at the bottom of the comments. You can see them at the bottom of this post from yesterday.
It also works the other way. As you can see at the bottom of the FriendFeed comments section, you can post a comment from this blog to FriendFeed.
This isn't perfect in my mind because the FriendFeed comments are not part of the main discussion and are posted at the end of the comments section. I'd prefer that they were fully integrated into the conversation. I also don't know if disqus will email me these FriendFeed comments, and if they do and if I reply to them, will they get posted both on this blog and on FriendFeed? If the answer to that last part is yes, then this is a very big deal to me. I hope Daniel and/or Anton will stop by and answer that question in the comments to this post (and on FriendFeed!).
I don't participate in the FriendFeed discussions and as a result, there aren't many on my content at FriendFeed. Disqus gives me an email (think blackberry) interface to the conversation going on here in this community. And so I am able to be in it all day long even though I am rarely at a desk in front of a computer after 7am most days. If disqus can extend the mobile email interface to FriendFeed, then I can engage there too and I'd get a lot more value out of that community too.
In any case, the comments the posts I write here and send to FriendFeed are no longer silo'd at FriendFeed and that's a great thing. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
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Comments (Archived):
Fred, thanks for the heads up. This is a great step for Disqus and shows their value which is really about surfacing the comment stream as the best part of a blog. A post is an inspiration for conversation. The conversation is where the value emerges and spreads and being able to have that carry over multiple locations/interfaces is when I think we’ll really start seeing the power.As I type I’m actually interested to see how those conversations might start integrating with hashtagged conversations on twitter or other micro-messaging platforms. Hash tags are the conversation threads in the 140 character environment like the comments are in the blog environment. Interesting…Thanks for inspiring more thoughts and conversation!
I think tweetbacks are an important set of comments that need to beintegrated similarly
hmmm interesting. I was thinking more of hash tags as a relatableconversation thread but tweetbacks/retweets are another piece. conversationand discovery are gold for sure.
Yeah, I agree that it’d be great to have both conversations interweave as one, but it’s actually a bit difficult now given that they are usually two different contexts. Disqus and FF have different users inherently and the overlap is not whole yet.There are a couple limitations we’re still working around, but this step brings the basic functionality to heavy FF users so we can work on making it more seamless. For the most part, this eliminates the need for separate FF plugins.We don’t enable email support for FF right now, but it’s been considered and we know it’s possible – so once the best way is determined, we’ll have it.
Thanks Daniel for stopping by and explaining that
This is great news. Any plans on releasing an API that third parties can link their commenting to Disqus? (We have our own commenting system but would like for our users to able to link them to their Disqus account)
I¹d like to see that happenI get a ton of comments at Seeking Alpha that need to get back to disqus aswell
We’ve toyed with that idea, and it’s quite doable.One way was to allow comments surfaced elsewhere (like from BackType) to show up on your Disqus profile as “unverified” comments made by you. And then use that philosophy to allow other blocks of comments from other services to appear.It’s really a product design decision at this point. I’m interested to hear how you’d use this.
I guess we would just want to make our comments like blog comments. By default they would only be stored with us but there would be an option for them to be saved to the user’s Disqus account. To be totally honest, it would be a nice to have and probably wouldn’t the top of our dev list any time soon.
Off topic, but I just came here via an adsense text ad on SAI. Fred, would love to hear your thoughts on using adsense for traffic arbitrage. Are you working off a revenue model vs what you charge for ads? Is it a worthwhile exercise? Thanks for any thoughts.
No, it¹s not that smartI am an investor in clickable and I want to use every product of everycompany we invest in and so my use case for clickable is running a series ofcampaigns that drive traffic to this blogI try to keep the cost to around $5/day and I¹ve learned a lot about theirservice (which is very good) and the keyword advertising business in general
Hey Fred, I commented on this post over at FriendFeed a few hours ago, but still don’t see it here…http://friendfeed.com/e/8e5…Maybe there’s just a delay? I also don’t see an option to post to FriendFeed from this blog post. I see the section where I would do that, but there’s no text box to submit my comment.
The option to post to FF should be at the very end of the FF comments whichare at the very end of the commentsThere is a delay and disqus is working on making it happen more quickly
Right, I see where the option to post to FF should be, but there’s no input box there… at least not for me.
Post to FF is only for Fred (blog owner) so he can reply to FF comments from Disqus (and we know it’s really him).I’ll see how long the sync usually takes, but we crawl for all blog entries on FF and bring those comments back here at an interval.
I have chosen to run by personal site and blog (www.ebrittwebb.com – still slim on content) on the Drupal platform, but have comments being handled by Disqus, my Blog entries posting to my FriendFeed profile and my lastest FriendFeed updates as a sidebar on my site.I still need to follow these steps to complete the Disqus/FriendFeed integration, and there is much more I want to do to make FriendFeed the syndication engine within my personal site, but your post encourages me that I’m moving in the right direction…for now anyway.
Oh, I see. Sorry, I misunderstood that feature. I thought it allowedvisitors to post a comment on AVC and automatically syndicate it toFriendFeed. My mistake. Thanks Daniel!
Is there any potential for duplication of content now that I have FriendFeed integrated with Disqus? I ask because I found with Facebook, for instancem when I had it consuming syndicated content from both FriendFeed and Twitter, it would capture duplicates of all my Twitter posts (Facebook<–Twitter and Facebook<–FriendFeed<–Twitter). If FriendFeed is becoming a powerhouse connector, like it seems, then does Disqus really need to connect directly to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc., or could/should it use FriendFeed as the engine for doing so?
As I type I’m actually interested to see how those conversations might start integrating with hashtagged conversations on twitter or other micro-messaging platforms. Hash tags are the conversation threads in the 140 character environment like the comments are in the blog environment. Interesting…
I had turned off Disqus for awhile because of formatting issues with one site, and just general screw-ups during the last upgrade, but this looks pretty cool.BTW, there’s a great Tweetback plugin that integrates well with your comments – http://danzarrella.com/beyo…
That tweetback service only works on wordpressI hope disqus launches one that works across the entire blog world
Gosh, I was so excited to share that with you that I forgot you’re a Typepaduser!
Wow !That’s a great news .Keep up the good work of updating info. on disqus …………