Sexy Widget

A Watershed Moment in the Blog Commenting Wars?

I've long considered blog comments to be one of the more fascinating social media startup battlegrounds in terms of the pace of innovation, the importance of the channel for distribution, and the lessons that can be learned by any company looking to build cross domain features.

From where I'm sitting, it appears that TechCrunch is evaluating the two major competing blog commenting services to be the default provider for TechCrunch comments: Disqus and JS-Kit.

Here's Michael Arringon on JS-Kit's new product ECHO:

this appears to be quite different. we’re going to spend some time with it next week and i may have additional thoughts. there is definitely some there there.

And in this post, TechCrunch is taking Disqus 3.0 for a spin.

Additionally, Seesmic video comments seem to have been ripped out of TechCrunch.

I'm not going to spend any time debating which of the two services is better - both are well backed companies with quality products and solid teams.  But this looks like a critical moment in the ongoing skirmish between JS-Kit and Disqus.

When Twitter unceremoniously dumped TinyURL for Bit.ly, the URL shortening wars were all but finished.  I don't expect TechCrunch's decision to carry quite the same impact, but there is no question that TechCrunch sits high on the distribution head for any company looking to secure blog commenting.  It does big traffic, it reaches virtually all earlier adopters / bloggers, and it will no doubt be a fabulous case study for whoever wins the business.  And TC's decision can't come soon enough - I don't know of a blog on the planet with more of an anon troll / commenter reputation problem than TechCrunch.

Additionally, the blog commenting space may very well be a winner take all situation.  As I wrote in an earlier post:

I believe that the blog commenting space has some serious network effects - the more blogs that adopt a certain, distributed blog comment provider, the more pressure there is on other blogs to switch over as not to silo themselves (and their commenters)... Because of these network effects, we may very well see a winner take all scenario emerge at some point in this space.  For this reason, today's skirmishes between the blog commenting contenders are worth following.

I've been following the blog commenting space for a while.  See here, here, here, here, here, and here

It will be interesting to see whether a nod from TechCrunch will be enough to tip this space in either Disqus' or JS-Kit's direction.

Here are some write-ups of Disqus V3: Disqus, TechCrunch, Mashable

And here are some write-ups of JS-Kit ECHO: JS-Kit, TechCrunch, Mashable

Why We Copied Posterous

My employer, RateItAll, just enabled instant review posting of anything via email.  Just send an email to reviews@rateitall.com with the thing you are reviewing in the subject line (e.g. District 9, Negra Modelo, TechCrunch, etc.), and the rating and the review in the email body, and the review will post instantly.  You can see some coverage here, here, here, and here.

This feature is an obvious ode to Posterous, the lightweight blogging platform whose primary publishing UI is the user's email client / service.

We're a small shop, so choosing what to work on is a big deal.  There were all sorts of other important things that we could have worked on - improving our search engine, making our service more accessible to mobile users, improving new user experience, etc. - but we chose to focus on email, an older, less sexy format.

I'm always interested in hearing about the thought processes that drive other entrepreneurs' decisions, so I thought it might be interesting to share ours.  Here we go.

1) With a small team, we try and put resources into the things that are working (as opposed to things that aren't).  This philosophy applies not only to our own projects, but what we see when we look around the social media landscape.  Posterous is working.

2) We are constantly looking at ways to reduce the barriers to contributing content.  We've implemented Facebook Connect, we've experimented with delaying the registration prompt as long as possible, and we've tried other UI tweaks to make it easier and faster to contribute content.  We're enamored by the concept of "lazy registration."  With emailed reviews, the emailed review IS the registration.

3) Email still figures prominently in our referral logs, much more so than Facebook and Twitter.  Social distribution gets all the buzz, but based on our logs, email still dwarfs those channels as a distribution channel.  Clearly, people are very comfortable sharing content via email - why not let them post it as well?

4) Virtually everyone who is online is comfortable with email as a publishing UI.  By teaching our service to accept content from a universal UI, we hope to make it less of a scary proposition for new users to get involved with our site. 

5) Emailed reviews represents our first baby step towards being a mobile service.  Anyone with a smartphone can now post reviews on the go.

That's our story and we're sticking to it.  In the meantime, you can post a review of this blog - instantly - by sending an email HERE.

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