Last week I posted about the cross domain blog commenting system Disqus. Josh Lowensohn, one of the excellent writers over at Webware, commented as follows:
… I didn't even need to log-in to post this since I already had an account. Disqus FTW.
Now Josh is a smart guy, and he gets to see far more web apps than most of us. I also know for a fact that Josh doesn’t drop an “FTW” on just any old web service. So what is it about Disqus that has him so fired up?
I’ll take a stab at it.
Widgets and platforms have opened a window of opportunity for web apps to break the confines of a single domain. Just two years ago, the primary path to success of an online publisher was to buy a catchy domain, build a neat web service, use word of mouth and SEO and PPC to drive traffic to their domain, and provide enough value so that folks came back and told their friends about it.
It’s different now.
The proliferation of open platforms that either allow embeds or expose APIs is increasing every day. Today, services like Disqus can reasonably hope to have thousands of blog publishers with varying degrees of technical prowess install the Disqus system on their blogs, extending Disqus’ reach far beyond the Disqus.com domain.
Instead of a web site, Disqus becomes a web wide feature. An infrastructure layer that unifies thousands of disparate web sites into a single experience for the blog commenter. A service that removes barriers to participation, preserves commenter reputation across domains, and reduces to one the number of logins a user has to remember to participate in blog conversations.
The opportunity is shifting. No longer should a web publisher dream solely of launching a successful web site. The dream is bigger now - a web publisher can now dream of owning a feature that spans the Internet. This is the promise of cross domain web services that is enabled by platforms and widget embeds.
The vision of cross domain web services is not a new one. Back in the day, when it became clear that there weren’t enough users to support the thousands of new ecommerce sites, everybody rushed to be a “B2B” – providing their particular web service to the sites that had reached critical mass, via the Application Service Provider (ASP) model. The most common implementation of this was the clunky co-brand. A web publisher such as Disqus would have reached out to say Blogger.com, and offer to build a site that looked sort of like blogger at blogger.disqus.com. There would be a sales cycle, with perhaps the negotiation of a set-up fee. There would be a contract. There would be conference calls and implementation plans. And then, maybe, there would be a co-brand that the comments link on a Blogger blog would link to. Cobrands would quickly grow stale as changes were made to the host template. The vast majority of cobrands died on the vine.
To reduce a really frustrating time on the web to four words:
It Was Too Hard
The biggest differences that I see today are; 1) There are more users; 2) There is more social media, providing more opportunities for features; and 3) Platforms, exposed templates, and increased end user expertise are enabling self service implementation.
And the opportunity is not only blog commenting – far from it.
A look at Ning’s core feature list is a nice starting point for features that might be won on a site wide basis:
Forums
Music
Photos
Blog
Videos
Groups
In this context, is it any wonder that we’ve all heard of iLike (music widget), Photobucket / Slide/ RockYou (photo widgets), and YouTube (video widget)?
Or that the brand new provider of free forums, Lefora, was written up today on TechCrunch? Or that I was fired up about Tangler?
And what about these features:
Social Games
Reviews
Calendars
Event Planning
Productivity Software
Shopping Carts
Couldn’t these features be won on a distributed, Internet wide basis as well?
I believe we are headed towards the day when virtually every web site taps into the global ecosystem of apps and widgets by allowing embeds and third party created apps.
So when Josh says “Disqus For The Win” – this is what I think he’s talking about - not just winning users for a domain, but winning an entire feature. Across the whole Web.
