I recently added Disqus to Sexy Widget, and I think they have a real chance to make it. To earn real estate on a blog, distributed service providers typically need to provide two levels of value; to the blog owner, and to the blog community.
Disqus checks those boxes. As a blog owner, I find value in a service that will manage things like comment spam, and that over time can remove obstacles to posting – specifically, by providing a single login that will work on multiple blogs.
From a blog community perspective, there is clearly value in a service that can preserve a commenter’s post history, login, and reputation across domains.
And it certainly doesn’t hurt that they have the Mac McCaughan factor working for them - a flagship client / investor who has big influence with the early adopter crowd.
However, Disqus does have challenges to overcome.
First and foremost, if my experience on TypePad is any indication, it’s not a trivial install. I had to upgrade my account from “plus” to “pro” ($8.95 per month to $14.95) to get enough control over my templates to install Disqus. For me at least, this is not a free service.
My first install attempt didn’t work. You have to hack a couple of different blog templates and replace bits of code, so it was conceivable that I might have screwed it up. However, there was no way for me to tell if it was user error, a problem with Disqus, or a problem with TypePad. Fortunately, I had made a copy of my original templates so I could go back to square one and try again.
My second install attempt didn’t work either.
While I am not a developer, I hack around enough with widget code and HTML that I feel pretty confident that if I’m unable to install a widget, there’s a good chance that others will struggle as well.
At this point, I reached out to the Disqus founders and explained the situation. I got an immediate response from Disqus cofounder Jason Yan which was awesome, who offered to go in and check it out. I gave Jason my login credentials.
Unfortunately, Jason couldn’t solve it either. For whatever the reason, my TypePad templates weren’t updating properly, so Jason opened up a support ticket.
A couple of days later, TypePad got back to us saying:
"We made a configuration change to your account that will allow you to
see the changes immediately. You may need to republish your templates
in order to see the changes.We are in the process of rolling out some new features to users,
including pagination and comment feeds. However, the features are not
fully supported for Advanced Templates and were affecting the display
of your blog. We are working on releasing these features to all users
very soon, and we appreciate your patience while we work to improve
TypePad."
So here we have a widget install that will cost me $6 per month, took several days, and required me to correspond with the cofounder of the service to make it work. Despite the fact that none of this was the fault of Disqus, it doesn’t change the fact that this was not a painless install process.
By definition, distributed services are dependent on host environments to work properly. When the Facebook platform acts up, your app looks bad. When TypePad templates don’t work properly, it could cripple your adoption.
In 1999, pursuing a distributed business model meant becoming an “ASP,” which required BizDev, sales cycles, and implementation conference calls. APIs and embeddable widgets have brightened the picture considerably – but as the case of Disqus illustrates, there are still challenges for those who are entirely dependent on host sites.
