There’s nothing worse as a blog owner to discover that your site isn’t loading properly. Saturday night at 10pm my time (3am PST Saturday) just before I was going to switch off for the night, The Inquisitr started doing funny things, like not loading the front page. I fired up Firebug to troubleshoot, and quickly discovered the issue was one of the Disqus widgets we had in the sidebar.

Disqus has experienced some downtime this year. Bloggers using a local install of WordPress and running the API plugin don’t have much to fear: comments revert to native WordPress comments when Disqus is down. Someone asked me this week if we’d dumped Disqus because one recent post wasn’t showing Disqus, so they were down at some stage earlier in the week as well. But that’s great if you’re only using Disqus for commenting: if you’re running widgets from Disqus there’s no fall back; if they don’t load, they stop everything past that point, as they did with The Inquisitr Saturday. The answer of course is to not run Disqus widgets, but we’ll get to that in a second.

Whether it was Disqus alone with issues I’m not sure. Ripping out the Disqus widgets caused more of the site to load, and then Outbrain was slowing things down a lot, so both may share a data center. I checked the one site I knew was running both: LouisGray.com and it was having the same issues. Our Technorati Engage 125px units also started throwing errors, so they’re still down today, along with FriendFeed integration.

I pinged Louis and his wise advice was that sometimes sites have outages, and it was the middle of then night so it wasn’t an issue for him. He’s right about it happening, but I don’t have to like it. For a 2 hour period we had only 200 visitors when we’d usually have 2000-4000, so it hurt.

In my anger I started shopping around for a Disqus alternative. SezWho and Intense Debate were the two sites I hit (JS-Kit is another service), and I decided to play with Intense Debate; it’s a small thing but Intense Debate offers far more information on their service than SezWho does, and it was the selling point.

I briefly ran Intense Debate here on The Inquisitr before switching Disqus back on once the issues had passed. Disqus is still running as I write this post, but I won’t commit long term to keeping it this way. Here’s why I nearly switched, and why I might yet.

Intense Debate For

Integrated WordPress commenting: no iFrame for Intense Debate, instead all comments are shown natively in WordPress. It’s an “advanced” view that delivers Intense Debate services in the one spot. Disqus by comparison has a highly confused interface: for example you don’t have all moderation features in their admin view, but you do on the post itself. In WordPress you get an iFrame.

Integrated FriendFeed comments: if I switch this will be a big selling point. Intense Debate imports FriendFeed comments into the comment thread itself, so they just look like standard comments. We’ve previously been running them here at The Inquisitr, but they aren’t combined in the comment thread. Disqus has previously talked about doing this, but they don’t do it today that I’m aware of.

Integrated Twitter support: not a huge selling point, but at a time where Twitter has never been more popular, the option to allow users to Tweet their comment complete with link can only help drive traffic back to your site. Disqus doesn’t offer anything similar.

Reputation Management: Both offer reputation management, but with Intense Debate it’s a stronger part of the presentation.

Disqus for

Better looks on site: You can customize CSS with Intense Debate embeds, but out of the box I prefer Disqus for looks. Intense Debate was more imposing on the page, from aggresive feature boxes through to a big “powered by Intense Debate” line at the base of the comments.

Bugs: One of the reasons I didn’t stick with Intense Debate was bugs; I’d swapped out Disqus due to server issues on their end, but the Intense Debate code caused local issues with their plugin and code base. I jumped on their support forums and others had reported issues as well. Better still, at the time of writing Intense Debate doesn’t support WordPress 2.7, which is all the more bizarre when you consider it’s owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress itself.

Community: The biggest reason I’m sticking with Disqus for the time being. I’m sure Intense Debate has a reasonable community, but I know among our regular readers that many have Disqus accounts. I also know many others sites we link to and share with run Disqus as well. Community is THE KEY selling point to Disqus, it was one of the reasons I cited when we signed up, it’s a key reason why using Disqus has driven comment growth here, and dumping Disqus risks the inverse effect of costing us commenters, and it’s a gamble I’d rather not make, at least now.

Better Widgets: when they work, Disqus widgets integrate better on blogs, and I use two of them for that very reason. The widgets for Intense Debate felt clunky, didn’t integrate well, and needed hacking for better looks. Lazy perhaps, but Disqus is better out of the box.

Underdog: I like supporting Disqus because they are a small, independent startup, and it helps that CEO Daniel Ha is a great bloke who can’t do enough to help you when you get stuck (well accept in the middle of the night naturally ). Intense Debate is an Automattic service, a big company with a near monopoly on self hosted blogs. Competition is best encouraged by supporting (within reason) the little guy.

Conclusion

As much as I’ll never get my lost sleep back from Saturday night (the light went out at 3am) my annoyance with Disqus gave me the opportunity to seriously look at Intense Debate, and I’m grateful that I did. It’s an impressive service, with many strong selling points. Competition in the market drives players to continually improve their service and features, and Disqus can easily improve in a number of areas based on what Intense Debate is doing. Disqus has my business for now, but that business could be snatched away in the future should a competitor be able to mount a strong enough reason to switch.

If you’re starting a new blog, or haven’t joined the commenting 2.0 revolution, you should have Intense Debate on your list. The switching path is easier than Disqus, and you could do far worse.

Related posts:

1. Intense Debate Ups Comment Ante With FriendFeed Support
2. Deals: Voxant, Intense Debate change hands
3. Disqus responds to critics: local comment hosting

Could Open ID have received the change it needs to finally break out from the domain of open source nerds and open platform zealots? You don’t get much higher than President-elect Barack Obama, and the change Open ID may need comes from Change.gov, the official website of the Office of the President Elect.

The transition team added the ability to comment on blog posts using Open ID this week as part of its installation of Intense Debate. Not all blog posts have comments points out Marshall at RWW, but those that do can now be commented on while logged in to an OpenID account.

For the 99% of people who don’t realize the fact, most of you already have an Open ID account of sorts if you have an account at Yahoo, AOL, and even Google. The easiest way to use it: type yahoo.com into the Open ID box and you’re redirected to Yahoo to sign into that site.

Related posts:

1. OpenID At The Tipping Point: What You Need To Know
2. An open letter to President Obama – Stay out of the newspaper business
3. Obama Lego Minifig

The AOL owned Userplane offers a variety of free and premium publisher tools, including message boards, chat, AIR applications and multimedia tools.

Userplane will offer JS-Kit’s Ratings service through Userplane’s distribution channels. JS-Kit will add Userplane’s Webchat application to its product offering. Combined the two companies will have a reach of over 900,000 registered publishers.

And so the battle for numbers continues in this space. JS-Kit announced $3.6 million in new funding October 14.

Related posts:

1. Userplane Partners with Community Platform Providers for Service Integration
2. Pixsy Lands National Lampoon Deal
3. Vator.tv Lands Education Deal

New SezWho functionality includes four new profile templates, including support for popular threaded discussion formats. More importantly for site owners, SezWho now offers support for local CSS and JavaScript. Other new features include Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down ratings for posts, configurable pop-ups, improved support for filtering, support for multiple WordPress installations in a single database, and easier upgrading.

SezWho has also announced a new partnership with Instablogs, that will see SezWho bring reputation management and universal profiles and content to Instablog readers. Instablogs’ readers can now rate posts and user-generated content on Instablogs and across other SezWho-enabled social media sites, including blogs, discussion forums, and bulletin boards.

The new features will be a welcome addition to SezWho users, and help the service define itself in a competitive space. The deal with Instablogs sees SezWho now powering a number of leading blog networks, including Creative Webloging.

Related posts:

1. SezWho Signs Deals with Entrecard, Creative Weblogging and Izea
2. SezWho lands b5media entertainment blogs
3. And then there was three: JS-Kit acquires SezWho

JS-Kit said it would use the new round to expand its developer and executive team. The first hiring is Chris Saad, founder of Faraday Media (Particls) and the Co-Founder of the DataPortability Project.

Its money at the right time for JS-Kit, as the worst of the economic crisis is yet to fully understood in terms of direct impact on the sector. JS-Kit is well positioned compared to some competitors, offering a variety of site specific widgets on top of its commenting 2.0 service.

We’ve not been a huge fan of JS-Kit in the past. The company felt it necessary to trash talk their opponents when they acquired Haloscan in July, and a constant need to attack your competition in my books says more about the company making the attacks then it does about the target. Saad will add some charisma to the mix, and despite his young age, some reasonable street smarts in the PR 101 playbook.

Related posts:

1. JS-Kit acquires HaloScan, but why trash talk Disqus?
2. And then there was three: JS-Kit acquires SezWho
3. Sweet: Sugar Inc raises $16 million Series C

The API itself has been is use for sometime, with an official WordPress plugin using the API instead of javascript to deliver SEO friendly commenting on WordPress blogs. We’ve been using the API plugin from the day with started using Disqus, and we have no complaints.

CEO Daniel Ha notes that developers can use the API to create import tools, export tools, or even a custom Disqus plugin for any platforms. This will allow users to create Disqus tools and plugins on platforms such as up and coming blogging platfrom Habari.

It’s a positive step forward for Disqus in the ongoing battle for users currently taking place between services in this space including JS-Kit, SezWho and the now Automattic owned Intense Debate.

Full documentation of the Disqus API can be found here.

Related posts:

1. Disqus Updates WordPress API Plugin, Now Supports Seesmic
2. Disqus Gets Trackback Support: One Less Excuse Not To Try It
3. JS-Kit acquires HaloScan, but why trash talk Disqus?

Voxant offers licensed videos from media outlets, including AP for use on websites. For bloggers the service also offers $7 CPM on ads shown with the videos, and attractive offering (we use them on occasion), although their catalog is not as extensive as competitor Clipsyndicate. Depending on the report, Voxant was either acquired or merged with Anystream, a provider of video encoding and content management to media companies including CNN and Sky. Financial details were not disclosed, but the statement from Anystream notes that the combined product will offer more content and become a leading playing the space.

Commenting 2.0 service Intense Debate, a competitor of Disqus, SezWho and JS-Kit but not widely used as it hasn’t yet launched (it’s still in closed beta) was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Mashable reports that the deal will see Intense Debate rolled out across millions of blogs on the WordPress.com network, delivering the service a massive boost at a time all competitors are looking for more users.

Related posts:

1. Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched
2. Intense Debate Ups Comment Ante With FriendFeed Support
3. Disqus releases a full public API

One of the most common arguments against using Disqus has been the hosted nature of the service, with comments residing on Disqus alone without a local copy. The new Disqus confronts the criticism head on, by offering a new API driven WordPress plugin that stores comments locally as well as on Disqus itself. The feature allows users to try Disqus at any time then leave the service without every having to worry about comment storage. Disqus CEO Daniel Ha tells me that there is has been a great emphasis in the new version of making sure that comments on each blog can be seen by search engines, delivering a completely SEO friendly package.

The new Disqus offers automatic data sync between Disqus and the local database so blogs are never out of date, seamless import/export of old and new comments allowing users to embrace Disqus in full on existing blogs, and the ability to moderate comments from within WordPress itself.

The Disqus site has undergone a large reorganization and redesign to be more intuitive, useful, and accessible. Users now have immediate access to their (and friends) comments to track and manage the discussion.

In the added or improved list includes adding moderators, setting permissions, block lists and comment system configuration.

In an interesting new offering, user profiles can now act as comment blogs. Comments are displayed as blog entries with appropriate context so people can share their contributions on other sites with friends and fans.

Disqus has found strong support in a competitive market that includes Sezwho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit. Disqus is now used on over 30,000 sites, and Ha believes that with the new features and emphasis on a strong API and local data retention that this figure will continue to grow.

The last excuse for you not to try Disqus has just been hit on the head.

Related posts:

1. Finally, Disqus gets native FriendFeed support
2. Lijit adds some comment goodness to its search
3. Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched

Entrecard’s blog ad network has added SezWho as a way to reward bloggers who participate on the site. Bloggers whose SezWho comments receive high ratings through SezWho will receive Entrecard credits to be spent on advertisements within the 14,000 strong Entrecard advertising network.

Blog network Creative Weblogging will offer SezWho reputation-driven user profiles across its network, and Izea will use SezWho to power its SocialSpark Solution Center.

The commenting 2.0 space has turned into a numbers race as the various players look to increase their presence. These three deals give SezWho a serious leg up against rivals including Intense Debate and Disqus. There is room for multiple players in the space, but the service with more eyeballs will ultimately come out on top, and perhaps go on to become the Google of the 2.0 commenting space. Expect more deals like these in the coming months.

Related posts:

1. SezWho lands b5media entertainment blogs
2. SezWho announces enhanced features, new partnership with Instablogs
3. Entrecard off the market, signs deal with OIO Publisher

JS-Kit isn’t often collectively bundled with the Disqus, Sezwho and Intense Debate as its commenting tools are offered along side a range of other inline blogging tools, including polls, ratings (placing it against Outbrain) and some in-blog referral tools. The move to acquire Haloscan would seeminly indicate that JS-Kit is getting more serious about its commenting platform at a time the 2.0 commenting market is heating up.

Venturebeat (also source on the news here) reports that JS-Kit took the opportunity to trash talk Disqus, saying that “Disqus hosts comments on its own servers and site and in so doing, takes away all the benefits that comments could have on a blog’s search engine ranking.” While Disqus does hosts comments on its own servers, comments can be seen in search engines when users use the API based plugin, one of the biggest selling points for me when I decided to go with Disqus to power comments on this blog.

But why the need for trash talk at all? Isn’t one of the 2.0 fundamentals that we can all get along?

I know when I considered joining a 2.0 comment service that one of the things that impressed me immensely (and it still does) about Disqus was not only Disqus founder Daniel Ha’s commitment to reaching out to me during the consideration process, but also his ability to respond to my concerns with positive responses about his own product without the need to belittle competing products in the process. I’ve also seen Daniel respond continually when criticism has arisen by embracing the criticism and challenging himself (and Disqus) to do better. The product isn’t perfect, and yes, there is always room for improvement, but Disqus continues to grow for the better, while being trasnsparent, open and friendly in the broader space. I can even remember Sezwho trash talking Disqus, and Daniel responded with an open invite to Sezwho on possible interoperability and never once denigrated Sezwho in return (that I’m aware of).

As competition between personal services in this space continues, and when the feature set from one service to the next is fairly close, I know I’m more likely to consider a service provider when and where they are positive players in the space, selling the merits of their service based on their service, without trash talking others. This may not always be the case (particularly for large, non-blog related services), but if I’m putting a service on a blog I own, it’s something that makes a great selling point for me, and as I talk to others, I hear similar positions as well.

Related posts:

1. Disqus releases a full public API
2. Disqus responds to critics: local comment hosting
3. And then there was three: JS-Kit acquires SezWho

With the new feature, Intense Debate users select FriendFeed from the control panel, enter their FriendFeed account details, and FriendFeed comments are then automatically included in the comment thread on their blog. Intense Debate notes though that as FriendFeed doesn’t support comment threading the comments won’t be threaded as such, but they will appear as part of the overall comment thread (and presumably local responses are threaded beneath FriendFeed comments in case of Intense Debate generated replies).

Intense Debate beats its main competitors Disqus and Sezwho in offering FriendFeed support, although many bloggers have been able to show FriendFeed comments on posts, but in a stand alone capacity (you’ll see it on this post…eventually).

One word for the announcement: great. I don’t use Intense Debate (I’m a Disqus user) but the ongoing feature arms race between the various platforms is creating better, more appealing products for end users and blog owners, and that’s good for blogging 2.0. The only remaining questions: who will offer FriendFeed support next, then what’s the next great feature one of the three will come up with.

(via Louis Gray)

Related posts:

1. Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched
2. Finally, Disqus gets native FriendFeed support
3. Disqus responds to critics: local comment hosting