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Tony Byrne

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Losing comments in the cloud - and the reader interaction marketplace

17-Mar-2009

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Implementation, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Vendor Viability & Financials, KickApps Platform, SiteLife

Last week we lost about 36 hours worth of comments on this site. It was either an outage at our hosted comments provider, IntenseDebate ("ID"), or some sort of configuration mistake on our part. We're investigating. Several comments from Adriaan's Hippo post in particular have evaporated. I apologize for that.

I won't rant, though, because IntenseDebate is free, and we knew what we were getting into. ID's competitor in the free hosted comments space, Disqus, has had hiccups of its own. You get what you pay for, and ID has actually been fairly reliable. And like I say, maybe we screwed up somewhere.

But it raises a more interesting phenomenon in the Social Software marketplace: the absence of lower-cost commenting services. To put it in terms of the scenarios we lay out in our Enterprise Social Software & Collaboration vendor evaluations, on our site today we're looking more for "Reader Interaction" than a "Branded Online Community." You already belong to enough communities -- we just want you to be able to talk to us and your peers about the commentary on this site.

I think basic reader interaction will become an increasingly important service, but Social Software vendors seem to be focusing on more expansive community tools with profiles, avatars, forums, ratings, and such that lead to, well, the creation of another full-blown site. (Aside: this is partly what we warned the Obama web leadership about.) Once you get beyond those two free commenting services, you have to turn to the likes of

• KickApps, in theory an a' la carte collection of community functionality, but the commenting service didn't strike us as cost-effective on its own
• Pluck, an even pricier (if well-regarded) commenting system geared towards major media customers -- also broadening more into online community creation and support

This issue came up a couple of weeks ago when I was talking about social computing with a large group of senior web managers in Washington, DC. What I want, and what I think many of them wanted, is a simple commenting service that's better than free, but not feature-rich and therefore fee-rich. Something we could inject into any arbitrary pages on our sites -- not just blog posts -- and is therefore not system- or vendor-specific. Am I missing something here?