In a discussion on Fred Wilson’s blog, David Semeria coined a phrase in passing, that Disqus was important in “turning comments into communities”. Great phrasing that spurred some thinking about community design problems that many of us have been trying to solve for years.
Virtual communities have struggled from inception to find platforms that engender natural conversations in places that felt like the real thing. But there was always a lack of a persistent identity across different communities. A struggle for a group of people to have a conversation in real time. A lack of ease to follow alerts on your comment string over time. And simply—the core problem of creating a dynamic platform that establishes a sense of place and time and natural speech.
Lately I found myself spending a lot of time across a series of blogs, participating, engaged, tracking links, looking at public profiles either at home or on my iPhone. I’m like everyone else and search for topics of interest and gregarious smart people. But these were all engaging blog communities to varying degrees. No static Idea Walls or boring listing of links to follow. Satisfying. Educational. Interactive and natural feeling. And interesting enough many of them were Disqus based.
You do need to think beyond comments when you define a community. Dynamic comment systems, like Disqus, are platform for online conversations that let them evolve into communities. The right people at one URL interested in an interesting topic are not necessarily a community. There needs to be the glue with real people hanging around. Disqus seems to have the platform glue, that secret sauce, that makes it all stick together just right from the conversational perspective.
BTW, Disqus–to those that don’t know it–is a commenting platform for blogs and web properties that provides a persistent user identity across communities, aggregates comments for public viewing, and through near real time alerts and just ease of use, make a ‘comment’ into a ‘conversation’ and into a ‘community’ in the best of cases. And it’s easy to install and administer. I’m using a free version on this blog.
I need to pay homage to four super smart visionaries of online community thinking that I had the privilege of working with that started the ball rolling. Douglas Crockford, Randall F. Farmer and Chip Morningstar who founded Electric Communities and for a time labored valiantly to bridge the early experiments in community to a ubiquitous platform for community and commerce. And Mark Jeffrey, co-founder of The Palace, one of the earliest and most successful avatar based communities which was acquired by Electric Communities.
Seems like some 15 years later, these guy’s visions of persistent identity, global ecommerce, and real online communities are finally beginning to happen and shaping a dynamic mobile reallity of which Disqus and others are leading.
