You call BackType a competitor to Disqus and ID? I'm not sure they are directly competing, IMO. - Phil G

Well, it's got my comments all in one place, I can pipe them in here and follow comments of others. Seems like Disqus and Intense Debate. But maybe I'm missing something? - Hutch Carpenter

BackType is not a competitor to Disqus or Intense Debate. And... if you don't know how they are different, you clearly stopped reading my blog. :-/ - Louis Gray

Start here: http://www.louisgray.com/live... - Louis Gray

It is a comments tracker and search, not a comments replacement system. - Louis Gray

I can't actually but backtype on my blog and have people leave comments in it, but as far as sharing where I'm commenting...it pretty much owns - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

Louis - is your point that there's no Disqus or Intense Debate overlap? - Hutch Carpenter

BackType overlaps a lot of what Disqus and Intense Debate do, at least from a commenter perspective. - Hutch Carpenter

My point is that you would not install BackType on your blog. BackType is a superset comments tracker. It finds my comments on Moveable Type, Disqus, Blogger, Wordpress, you name it. Then I can search it or follow people. Show me how you would replace your comments on your blog with BackType code and we have a discussion. - Louis Gray

I agree with Louis that I don't think BackType is competing directly. I do think their service overlaps with something centralized commenting systems already do, which is to.. well, track comments across various blogs and other places. BackType opens the scope by supporting tracking your comments wherever they are, in whatever form. But unlike Disqus and ID, it most definitely isn't a centralized comment service. In other words, Backtype is not the engine you would use to create new comments. - Phil G

However, you might make the case that with Backtype, the need for a centralized comment system diminishes. But I think other benefits, such as a persistent identity across supporting blogs, familiarity of interface and spam detection/removal are all benefits that make these systems worthwhile. - Phil G

This space is a mess. Use Service D to comment on some blogs, Service I for others, use either service on your own blog, then Service B pulls stuff together from blogs that don't use either I or D. Then everything you say needs to go into service F and go back to Service T if you want, but you have be make sure you're not using Service P and sending everything to every other service, or it'll all end up as duplicates. Plus if you use service D to comment on somebody's blog and have that service... - Ken Sheppardson

...feeding Service F, then every comment will show up as a new item in service F, disconnected from the original post you were commenting on. - Ken Sheppardson

I hear you on the mgt system for comments. Certainly Disqus and Intense Debate "force" commenters to go through their systems if you want to comment on blogs using them. I guess it's all the same to the commenters - you have to sign up for all 3. But I don't think commenters care one way or another. Maybe I'll appreciate ID more once wordpress.com has it. - Hutch Carpenter

Oh, and remember that everybody that uses service G to read your blog and sends items they find interesting to service F also creates a new path through the system. - Ken Sheppardson

Thanks for this discussion, Hutch, Louis, and Phil. I figured BackType was just like ID and Disqus and hence never looked into it further, but reading about it here makes me think I want to. - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

Sorry. I get like that every once in a while. Nevermind. - Ken Sheppardson

Thanks for the comments everyone -- we don't believe we are a competitor with either Disqus or ID; in fact, we recommend both. Anything that improves the quality of comments is complementary to BackType :) - Christopher Golda

@Ken, we hear you. You should write a blog post and then let us know your solution. - Louis Gray

Ken - you've got a good point of view there. It's let a 1,000 flowers bloom right now! - Hutch Carpenter

Louis: I'm working on it. It's going to be epic, of course. ;-) The blog post, that is. I have no idea how to fix it. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken: We already pull comments from D into B; we'd like to support I. To make things worse, we'd also really like to pull F comments into B ;) - Christopher Golda

Chirstopher: Please don't. - Ken Sheppardson

Hutch - I can see your point, that without a certain amount of ubiquity, if a blog has Disqus or ID you still have to have a login for it, which is almost as annoying as filling out the standard personal info fields on a standard WP comment. However, Intense Debate already supports OpenID directly, and soon Disqus will as well. I think that will take us a long way to having an easy common way to use these various commenting systems. - Phil G

@Ken, BackType _should_ always err on the side of inclusion. They _should_ give people the option of pulling in comments from all services, and they should also give the comment owners the option to opt-out of some importation. They integrated Digg and Reddit not too long ago, so it makes sense they'd get the go-ahead for FriendFeed comments as well. Don't stop innovating. - Louis Gray

I am also looking forward to your post, Ken! - Phil G

Louis: I hear ya. First, though... what's a comment? Is this a comment? If I @-reply to somebody on twitter, is that a comment? If I @-reply on one Laconi.ca instance using the userid of somebody on another instance and assume they'll see it because they're using track is that a comment? We're mashing up context beyond all recognition, blurring all the lines between top level posts/dents/tweets and comments, and ending up with oatmeal. Just because we can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea. - Ken Sheppardson

How do either compare to coComment? Are they competing directly with it? - Tyson Key

Tyson - that's a good question. Don't know right now - only familiar with these 3 so far. Anyone else? - Hutch Carpenter

Is coComment still around? I haven't seen it anywhere. As far as I know, though...it's about the same as Disqus/ID. Also in this space are Sezwho and I think JS-Kit. Backtype isn't in direct comp with any of them. - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

@Rasheen I don't know how many people use it, but it's still running, and my blog has both coComment and DIsqus available to the few people that actually use it (about 2 visitors :|)... - Tyson Key