I just saw a tweet from @disqus declaring that you can now pull/post Disqus comments with FriendFeed!  Of course, I have immediately enabled it, and we will see how well it works.

The process to enable the integration is fairly simple (steps blatantly stolen from the Disqus blog post):

1. Visit Account Services
2. Click Enabled
3. Retrieve your FriendFeed Remote Key and fill in the blanks
4. Then, visit The Administration Panel
5. Choose Your Site from the drop-down
6. Click the Settings tab
7. Check FriendFeed comments

If you don’t already have your blog in FriendFeed, add these additional steps:

1. Visit The FriendFeed Services Page
2. Click Blog
3. Add your RSS feed

If you want the full story with illustrated steps, I recommend checking out the Disqus Blog post.

In the past week or two, I have been playing with a number of new toys that promise to tie the social networks Twitter and FriendFeed to my blog a little more tightly.

TweetSuite

First, there’s TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella.  This is a err.. sweet little self-contained plugin that makes your WordPress blog aware of the Twitterverse.  There are four main components that make up TweetSuite:

1. A tweet this button that can be floated in the upper-left or upper-right portion of a blog post.  Very similar to a Digg button.
2. An area below the post that tracks tweets about the article and lists them, complete with the optional ability to include a re-tweet button next to them.
3. Four fun Twitter-related widgets that can be dropped in the sidebar: Most, Recent, Last, and Favorite Tweets.
4. Last but not least, TweetSuite will optionally update Twitter when a new entry is posted.

I am not so invested in Twitter that I can tell if TweetSuite is catching all the Twitter buzz surrounding my entries.  It did detect one tweet on my last entry and a couple more on older posts.. but that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this post!  To see if it works.

FF2Disqus

Second, I am using a cloud-based app called FriendFeed-to-Disqus (or FF2Disqus).  This little utility is by Carter Rabasa, the guy who wrote Twitter2FF, a handy utility for synchronizing your Twitter and FriendFeed friends.  Anyway, this web app isn’t a plugin, and in fact hooks in to FriendFeed and Disqus, so it isn’t specifically bound to WordPress blogs at all!

What it does is monitor a service on FriendFeed (say the RSS feed for your blog) and utilizes the Disqus API to push any new comments on the relevant entry in FriendFeed to your blog entry.  So in effect what this does is bring the comment activity back in to your blog.

There have been a rash about this utility and the value that it brings to blogs and FriendFeed.  I have to admit that I share a few reservations about deploying it full-time on my blog.  But I decided, I would jump in with both feet and see how everything turns out.  Hopefully, everything will be great.

Final Note

I have disabled Glenn Slaven’s excellent FriendFeed Comments plugin for the moment in order to avoid redundancy.  But don’t think I don’t like it – far from it!  If FF2Disqus doesn’t work out I’m going straight back to using this plugin!

Yesterday, I saw a breaking news blog entry relating to Outbrain and Disqus. It’s a very small update in the Outbrain widget that detects if Disqus is being used and asks if the person rating an article would like to leave a Disqus comment as well.

Although the integration isn’t huge, it did catch my attention and I decided to install Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain is a plug-in content rating system that also provides recommendations automatically at the end of each article where it is installed. There is no special logins needed to rate an article, just click on the number of stars you think the article deserves and your rating is recorded.

The install was very quick and easy, with one odd hiccup. The hiccup came when I was instructed to paste in a unique activation code for my blog in to the plugin’s control panel.  After hitting the button to attempt activation, I eventually got a ‘timeout’ error. I tried the same steps several times with no joy. 

Eventually, however, I noticed that my blog management page on the Outbrain web site apparently decided I was activated, and allowed the plugin to operate normally. It was all very mysterious and I never actually got the confirmation through the control panel as I should.  But knock on wood, I am up and running.

As you can see in my screenshot, I rated my own article to see if the Disqus integration was working. However, it didn’t ask me to leave a comment.  (I subsequently figured out the ‘comment’ link only appears on the single post page, after the Disqus module loads.)

There are a number of great blogs that I follow that are now using the Outbrain plugin, such as Louis Gray, CenterNetworks, WinExtra, The Inquisitr, and VentureBeat.

Tonight, I got a SMS message from Disqus on Twitter.  The tweet was pretty succinct:

Disqus for WordPress 2.03 released.: This release includes trackback/pingback and pagination support as we.. http://tinyurl.com/5z98kh

That was enough for me!  Disqus’ lack of PingBack support in WordPress was really something that I missed, as you can probably tell from this article’s title.  So, without wasting another minute, I followed the link to the blog entry, and downloaded the new version of the plugin, 2.03.

And, I’m happy to report that it does indeed support trackback and pingback support!  I’ve included a screenshot below.

Disqus TrackBacks

Thanks for your hard work, Disqus team!

This weekend Twitter has been more reliable than Identi.ca. Steve Gillmor ‘dented a threat about returning to Twitter. And Dave Winer tweeted that he was thinking of mirroring his tweets to Identi.ca.

During the conventions, and up to and including this weekend, Identi.ca has found out what Twitter already knows: the Jabber chat protocol “firehose” can be a wild stallion, even for a site that is an “increasingly quiet echo chamber”. It’s the same feature that brought the Fail Whale at Twitter during the primaries in May. It is now disabled at Twitter but for approved vendors such as FriendFeed and Gnip.

[ ... ]

I was at CNET in San Francisco last Friday with Evan Prodromou and representatives from Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Disqus and Seesmic. Evan mentioned that there could be millions of MicroBlogging networks in a few years.

There was a 58% drop in unique visitors to Identi.ca, that’s the only service where anyone can take their friends and the site’s software and make their home base wherever they want to. That probably affects the site’s traffic numbers.

I implemented the very same openmicroblogging protocol myself this summer. The 0.1 version of my Identi.ca-compatible software, OpenMicroBlogger, has been downloaded about 700 times in 3 weeks.

– Brian

Originally posted as a comment by brianjesse on louisgray.com using Disqus.

…

Now on comments throughout DISQUS, you can find a reblog link where you can publish a quotation of the comment to your blog. This quote is cited with the original author, the blog where it originally appeared, and a link back to the original comment to give the discussion full context.

At the moment, we’re supporting publishing to WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, and Tumblr with more platforms to come.

So next time you see a comment that everyone really needs to read, give it a whirl. We’re excited to see more good content bubble to the surface.

Originally posted as a comment by Devin on A VC using Disqus.