Disqus and Drupal: Rethinking Comments
For those of you who don't know what Disqus is, it's a web service that provides a slick enhancement to comments in websites. Usually when you visit a website, you see a discussion going. This discussion usually just takes place on that website. What you're left with is a bunch of different websites with a bunch of different discussions going on. Disqus rethinks this philosophy by bringing all of those different discussions together.
If you're making a comment on a website that uses Disqus, you'll be able to not only do cool things like make posts from your mobile device, reply to threads through email or make voice comments, you'll also be able to see other discussions going on about the same thing from other websites. You can track where you're discussions are taking place, and get email updates when replies are made. You can also subscribe to a user's comments, export your posts, or import new sets of comments. In essence, Disqus is rethinking how discussions are taking place on multiple different websites.
Although the Drupal comment module is pretty nice, it didn't do exactly what I wanted on my own site. Disqus seemed like a nice alternative, so I put together a Disqus Drupal module, which implements the Disqus web service using Drupal. It allows you to add a discussions on any node type (although we could easily extend this to any taxonomy item, any view, etc). The Disqus guys are working hard on adding import features, as well as extending their API, so there are plans to take advantage of those with this module later on, but this is a good start. If you're interested in trying it out, feel free to make a comment on this post saying where you plan to use Disqus. Enjoy the Disqus Drupal module, and feel free to add any additional ideas you may have!