Disqus launches Blog Commenting App

By Vivek | October 31st, 2007 at 04:18 am ET         

Disqus, about which fellow blogger Ashish Singh had written about couple of months back, today finally launched it’s feature-full blog commenting system. Among others, the YCombinator startup competes with Js-Kit, Intense Debate, and SezWho.

Disqus is branding itself as a “distributed comment system for blogs and websites.” The app delivers both a forum like interface to keep your conversations glued together, while replacing your existing commenting app. As a blog owner you need to install the plugin for WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, and TypePad to get going quickly. Comments from your existing/default commenting system stay put, and for any new comments, the Disqus app kicks in.

Blog/site owners have pretty much complete control over the look and feel of plugin. For those concerned about the content, Blog/Site owners still own all the content created and stored at Disqus. And when you are talking about comments, commenting spam is never always the thing to watchout for. Disqus team has built an inhouse comment spam protection that is backed by Wordpress’s Akismet. Disqus has also introduced an API with the launch, but I am not sure what direction they are taking with it.

As for search engine indexing of the comments, the app places all the actual comment content on the blog/site page. In other words, no loss over SEO goodiness.

From comparison standpoint, competing commenting application Js-Kit also makes sure that search engines can index  publishers data. As for data backups, Js-Kit provides access to blog/site owner data via RSS feed which provides real-time export of all comment data back to the publisher. JS-Kit has also added moderation tools to it’s Comment Service, including Pre and Post moderation of comments, SPAM protection,
and Session & IP level blocking. The app also comes with visitor controls like “score” comments and the flexibility to sort comments by score (”Karma”), visitor name, and date. 

On the whole, the basic feature set is comparable but Disqus does beat Js-kit in terms of UI/end user experience. From my standpoint, I am still undecided :-/