Greg Lexiphanic

What’s the best solution for comments?

In my last post, I asked whether blog comments are dead. By that, I mean do we still need built-in commenting tools? The majority of our discussions are happening on other networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Those places are where you hang out with your friends online, anyway. Why talk to a bunch of friends about something when you can talk with your friends about it instead?

From a blogger’s perspective, having comments located only on each blog post doesn’t do much for spreading the word, either. Who’s going to see the discussion, the community, the blog, if it only happens here?

There are other solutions that try to draw traffic back to the site by making it possible to share it out beyond the site, such as the Disqus and IntenseDebate commenting systems. But these still confine the conversation to the blog.

The only solution is to entirely excise commenting from this blog and allow it to occur elsewhere. Instead, the space normally used here for comments operates as an archive of the conversation.

So, for now, commenting is powered by Twitter. One might argue it is the largest commenting platform out there – it’s just that no one has hooked it up to a blog before.

Feel free to give it a go. Include a link to this post in your tweet (it’s okay to use a URL shortener), or reply to a tweet that is listed here (make sure it’s a “proper” Twitter reply and not just an @mention).

Is this enough though? What’s missing?

[EDIT]: It would have helped if I had not forgotten to switch on the commenting system before. Now fixed. The system should pick them up shortly. Apologies, folks.

• 21 July 2010