Disqus is a leading third-party comment option for bloggers. In the past, my opinions about Disqus have been mixed. I started out by calling it stupid. Then, about a year ago Disqus fixed some of my concerns, yet I ended up still not using it on my blog.

As you might be able to tell, I am currently using Disqus on this blog. What drove me over the edge?

Old Problems Fixed

Originally, Disqus seemed like a really bad idea because it removed comments from your blog and placed them on somebody else’s server. This is content – YOUR content – that would need to be handed over to somebody else. And being that it was using javascript to embed the comments on the blog, all SEO benefits were gone.

Once they moved to version 2.0, all that changed. Disqus now uses an API to include comments on your blog, meaning that the comments ARE in your source code and give you full SEO benefits. Even more importantly, there is full interchange between your blog and Disqus such that all new comments get auto-posted to your local database. This is important so that I can stop using Disqus if I want and I don’t lose anything.

All in all, Disqus is now a safe option to use. You’re not going to lose your comments and you have a way out.

But, why bother? Why stop using WordPress’s own comment system?

Benefits to Disqus

What put me over the edge was the ability to increase the social interaction and the community on my blog. In particular…

• Ability to easily allow people to log in via Facebook Connect, Twitter or OpenID.
• Using Facebook Connect, it provides the option for a commenter’s comment to appear on their wall in Facebook – increasing viral promotion of my blog.
• Readers have the ability to pipe their comments into other services (Friendfeed, for example). Again, this increases the viral promotion of a comment on my blog because their comment will potentially appear in other places on the web.
• Ability to easily see what other sites each commenter is commenting on. This acts to help people find others of similar interest, plus it helps in cross-promotion among similar blogs.

In short, using Disqus allows my blog to be better integrated into the social community by way of user comments rather than having each comment be self-contained to this blog.

Still pondering making the switch to Disqus over on PCMech as well.

What are your thoughts on Disqus?