What does FriendFeed, Digg, Twitter, and YouTube all have in common? They enable the audience to participate in a discussion revolving a particular piece of content. As more social networks have cropped up on the web, this has caused an increase in what is known as conversation fragmentation. That is, bits and pieces of a conversation spread throughout these services. Getting a grasp on the big pictures has been difficult due to the differences in the way each service handles the conversation.
All of that looks poised to change as the big news the other day was centered around Mashable.com teaming up with Disqus and UberVu to launch what they call Social Media Comments.
Today Mashable is announcing an exclusive partnership with the blog comment service Disqus with regard to their integration of the comment aggregation service UberVU. For the next two weeks, you’ll be able to test Disqus-powered social media comments exclusively on Mashable, getting a glimpse at what both companies think is the future of blog comments. Of course we also have to thank UberVU for powering this comment aggregation feature.
As an extra special feature, Disqus users posting comments to Mashable can now syndicate their comments to Twitter – simply go to your Disqus account settings and enable Twitter.
Exciting news for sure, but after browsing through the comments, there are a couple of things I noticed. First, some people are already complaining that this is information overload. Why must the comment form on a blog be subjected to a long list of information that is not sortable nor easy to browse through. Secondly, how useful is it for example to see 30 messages on Twitter from people simply passing the TinyURL link on to someone else without actually providing any substance to the overall conversation.
While this is a great way to defragment the conversation that seemingly takes place across all of these services back onto the originating blog, I still feel as though the best place to have a conversation about a piece of content on is on the comment form of that particular website. But, that is a pipe dream and people are going to converse about things where their friends hangout, not on someones blog.
Are you going to be using Disqus to tap into Social Media Comments for your blog? If so, why?