will it be enough to switch? - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Switch from Disqus? No way. But it's a good step in the right direction for the Web as a whole. - Louis Gray

First, I find it ironic the headline is "Fractured no more" and I've seen this story shared multiple times across FF :) Second, under the current model the blog will pull the comments from FF, but I don't think it will place comments made on your blog in the FF thread. Therefore, the more complete conversation will be back on the blog. Hopefully the blog will note that the comment came from friendfeed so that people will be able to distinguish between the two types of comments. - Frankie Warren

it looks like you can have your cake and eat it too. i just added it along with disqus, which i already had. whipping up a blog post to test it now. - Christian Anderson

I'm sold on Intense Debate which everyone pretty much knows :) - Bwana ☠

If it's how Frankie describes, that's awful. Why would I want to check two different places to see if someone replied to my comment? - Mark Trapp

I just left a comment somewhere, can't remember. And I saw a guy in an elevator and talked to him about it, my wife is in, and I think I might have dropped the subject somewhere at this party I was at last night, although I can't remember if I was actually there or not. O yeah, and I just placed this comment here too. What is this fracturing all about, not a big deal obviously ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

Mark, it's half of the solution. The other half is still fragmented. The reply gets pushed into FriendFeed, but not in the same thread. Naturally, we would want to progress to all comments being present in both threads. We're not there yet. But this addition greatly improves what it was before. Unless you were a wordpress user (and now blogger), friendfeed comments were no where on your blog, now they are. Next step is centralization of _everything_ - Bwana ☠

so impressed, I installed the plugin for commenting on my own blog :) - Lyndon Washington

I don't know Bwana. I know it's progress towards the eventual goal of conversation mirroring, but I think they were better off until they could do that. Now, instead of following an entire conversation in one medium (with several parallel, but complete, conversations happening in other places), I get fractured replies, questions, and subthreads all over the place. Did you reply to me in Friendfeed? Or did was it in the blog comments? I can no longer follow a complete conversation in FF. Which sucks ass. - Mark Trapp

@Bwana, web 2.0 centralized too much already for us. If we are ever to get rid of that, we better stop centralizing more. Conversations are fractured by default, no use trying to control or oppose that. I think it is a nice to have feature, to see where things are being disqussed (was that a typo?), but we get to see less then 0,000000001% of what is "part of" this conversation. And that is fine. Letting it go gives us all the freedom to start new ones ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

I'm all for distributed conversations -- however; it's great to be able to centralize the discussions so users can easily pick which one to participate in. I was hoping the ID integration would separate the FF comments from the blog comments. Hopefully that's something they can tweak. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

I'm not sure you understand Mark. The only difference now is that the FriendFeed comments are on your blog now. Before, if you replied to a ID or Disqus comment on FriendFeed, it was fractured there. So you had three conversations: FriendFeed post, Blog post, Disqus/ID post on Friendfeed. The FF comments were lost on the blog post (unless you had a plugin). Now they're not. That's the only difference. You STILL have three possible conversations, but now the FriendFeed and Blog are closer than before. - Bwana ☠

It's not more fragmented now, it's closer. There are still three conversations, but one of those conversations has more context. So 2 out of the 3 conversations are almost synched. Once they are synched, the third conversation goes away. For me, this is MUCH better than before. - Bwana ☠

Bwana, say I reply in friendfeed and someone on the blog itself, who has no idea about friendfeed, replies to my comment. unless im constantly checking the blog itself (which doesnt repost like friendfeed) im going to miss that part of the discussion. the conversation was fragmented before in that there were separate conversations happening in different places... now the SAME conversation is happening in different places. I obviously believe this is a step in the right direction, but i don't think the solution's complete until the blog can thread its posts in with the friendfeed thread. - Frankie Warren

Agreed Frankie, the lack of threading really hurts context. Shey brought up a good point in that the conversations should be separated on the blog until threading is implemented. I can see the need for that. And sorry Mark, I see your point now. After seeing it work on my blog, it's becoming more clear. - Bwana ☠

Perhaps just a badge, or something to that effect, noting that the comment was made in friendfeed with a link to the friendfeed discussion. that way when someone replies in friendfeed and the end user is reading the blog... they can click the link, reply in friendfeed and then ID will pull that response out of the friendfeed thread and post it on the blog. a little complicated, but everyone's happy :) - Frankie Warren

Frankie, there's a badge now, but it doesn't link to the conversation, just to the blog owner's profile. So you can distinguish FF comments from blog comments, but they're not threaded so it's a bit hard to gather context. It's like Twitter :) Example here: http://www.bwana.tv/2008... - Bwana ☠

Ah ok thanks for the link :) - Frankie Warren

don't both Disqus and IntenseDebate take away from the added SEO provided by locally hosted comments? - Andy Sternberg

good questions about SEO. My guess is linking FF comments will increase SEO, but not sure. another question - Christian Anderson

@Bwana, for the comment linking to work, does your post need to arrive on FriendFeed directly from your blog versus a tweet or you directly posting a blog link to FF? - Christian Anderson

If you use self-hosted Wordpress, Disqus does not take away any SEO juice, as the comments are right in the HTML source. Otherwise, these plugins *will* prevent search engines from indexing your comments, because they are only displayed through a little javascript widget that most search engines won't index. - Pat Hawks

Andy, the Disqus WP plugin inserts the comments as plain HTML into your post, which means you get the full SEO benefit from them. - Dewald Pretorius

thanks for the replies -- i do self-host wordpress w/ disqus plugin BUT - when I view the html source of a post w/ comments it still shows only the .js pulling from disqus and NOT the actual context of the comment. - Andy Sternberg from twhirl

plugin != js. I still prefer having the comments also in *my* database. - Nicole Simon

I won't use Disqus until the API version is rocking. - Eric Hamilton

fwiw, i'm taking my question re: SEO/wp-plugin over to GetSatisfaction: http://getsatisfaction.com/disqus... - Andy Sternberg

i added it to my blog. it should be live now. if you want to give it a try, use this link http://friendfeed.com/e... - Christian Anderson

For those concerned about the mixup of conversations, I passed on this mockup to the Intense Debate guys: http://friendfeed.com/e... Since FriendFeed doesn't offer threading, there's no true two way sync, this may be the best workaround - Bwana ☠

I think ID really has the right idea, easy import / export if I want to leave, and a very active support staff. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

been waiting for this - Tyler Gillies