Competition

The market for commenting services has become quite competitive lately. Yahoo, for example, just announced an alliance with JS-Kit yesterday, and Facebook also just released a commenting plugin based on Facebook Connect as its first social widget. Other competitors of IntenseDebate are obviously Disqus, which already offers integration with Seesmic, and Google's Friend Connect. None of these, however, offer the extensibility that IntenseDebate's new plugins now offer.

Adding these plugins looks like a smart move on IntenseDebate's part. Not only can it now tap into a pool of talented coders (and possibly hire the best ones in the long run), but - once more plugins become available -  it will also be able to offer its users new features that none of its competitors offer. At the same time, this also allows the IntenseDebate team to focus on its own core product and the stability and speed of its service.

What Would You Add?

If you could write a plugin to extend your favorite commenting platform, which features would you add?

"The TypePad Connect team has now explicitly added support to sign in using your Vox, Google, Yahoo!, Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, or AOL account in addition to your TypePad username and password."

The new credential options augment the existing OpenID log in option that existed when the product launched.

While the exponential increase in the number of users who now have access to TypePad Connect is interesting, what is most compelling about this announcement - in my opinion - is that it marks another positive step forward in leveraging existing identities - and reducing credential fatigue. As a user with more than enough logins spread around the Web, it's always nice to encounter services that allow me to log in with an existing identity from another service - instead of forcing me to create yet another login.

Here's hoping this is among the first of many such announcements, this year.

While the first group of sites that were allowed to leverage Connect - CBS The Insider, CNN The Forum, Connected Weddings, Global Grind, Govit, Indie GoGo, MoveOn.org, and Red Bull - were a good test case, Facebook is stepping into a whole new realm with its next round of sites - Discovery Channel, The San Francisco Chronicle, Geni, Hulu, and Digg. It's a safe bet that Digg will be the most interesting test case to date.

What Does Facebook Connect Do?

Facebook Connect proposes to make data and friend connections currently held within the walled garden of Facebook accessible to other services. This has two distinct benefits, one for the sites and one for Facebook.

For the participating sites, Facebook Connect provides more social functionality without a great deal of additional development. A new user can opt to share the profile information in Facebook instead of developing a new account. This gives the user access to the site and its services without the tedium of developing yet another profile on yet another site. In addition, users can use the relationship information in Facebook to connect to their friends on the other services. In short, it makes the new partner site an extension of Facebook.

And that hits upon the distinct benefit for Facebook: more data. Before Connect, Facebook's understanding of user behavior was relegated to what occurred on Facebook and, potentially, through third-party Facebook apps. With Connect, Facebook will extend its reach exponentially. In so doing, it will gather even more data on Facebook users, whether they're within the walled garden or not.

Facebook Beacon, Part 2?

One of Facebook's primary marketing concerns with Facebook Connect has been to extend the value of its advertising-based revenue model while - obviously - avoiding the debacle that was Facebook Beacon. That has pushed Facebook to pursue a slow, methodical release of Connect, proceeding with caution to avoid any similar gaffs.

For now, they have the luxury of time. Facebook has continued to roll out their distributed social offering more quickly than the competition. And no doubt, they're learning a few things along the way that will give them a decided advantage over similar services.

But can they turn that early lead into a decisive victory?

Adoption Is the Key

If Facebook beats everyone else to the party, that doesn't mean they've won the race. The true value for Facebook is getting users to adopt Facebook Connect and extend their profiles to these external sites. Adoption will be the true deciding factor.

And that's why this new group of Facebook Connect sites will be interesting to watch. With the first group, Facebook was able to prove the concept had merit. With this latest group, they will be working to prove that users actually want to use the service.

Will Digg users be willing to connect their profiles and begin shouting to their Facebook friends? Is there a great deal of crossover between Facebook users and Discovery Channel? Will enough Facebook users watch the latest SNL skit on Hulu to provide useful data?

It's safe to assume that there is crossover between Facebook and any number of sites. But, the question remains: will the population of users who opt to use Connect be large enough to pay off? It's hard to say. We'll just have to wait and see how Connect performs in the wild.

For users familiar with the Six Apart family of products, the profiles will be a welcome step forward from the original TypeKey implementation and the new commenting features offer functionality users have come to expect from commenting systems. But it's TypePad Connect - or more appropriately the vision for what TypePad Connect could be - that makes this announcement interesting.

According to Six Apart, TypePad Connect "makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email." In other words, it's your lifestream and your blog conversations - be they on your blog or someone else's - all in one spot.

At first blush, TypePad Connect may appear to be a reactionary response to services like IntenseDebate, Disqus, and Backtype - possibly even FriendFeed. Services that have all but usurped the conversations that once were the domain of individual blogs.

And maybe in some ways, it is. But there's clearly something else happening here.

If it lives up to its promise, TypePad Connect has the potential to combine both popular lifestreaming features and comment-aggregation features under one user profile. And with an open approach, they could do it in a way that allows users to begin to experience the promise of the distributed social Web.

Vision

When it comes to understanding the social Web, SixApart definitely has vision. The company sprung from the early days of blogging, launching one of the first major blogging platforms. They were the birthplace of OpenID, a single digital identity that has continued to gain support throughout the online community. Members of the company remain deeply involved in a number of efforts driving the social Web today.

This move toward a distributed social presence falls right in line with their previous efforts. Like other services with "Connect" in their names - Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect - TypePad Connect has a grand vision of moving personally relevant content outside the proprietary constructs of specific blogs - or even of Six Apart, itself - and making it useful and accessible to other services.

In other words, the same way that Facebook Connect, for example, offers other sites access to your Facebook profile information - saving you the time of establishing yet another profile on yet another service that replicates the information you already have stored elsewhere - TypePad Connect offers other blogs easy access to your profile. And in return, you get the ability to manage all of the comments you make from one spot. Your profile is no longer beholden to a blog or service, it's available to be distributed.

Embracing the concept of community that has the ability to exist and live outside the walls of a given blog or proprietary product is definitely a step in the right direction. (For that matter, it doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to see the value of having a TypePad Connect profile as the endpoint for an OpenID URL.) TypePad Connect could be another step toward the realization of a truly distributed social Web.

Current Reality

Even in its current beta iteration, the offering has some definite benefits. Things like simplified avatar management, lifestreaming of multiple services under one profile, and comment management features from a central dashboard will be appealing to many existing Six Apart customers and will likely attract new users, as well.

But as with any beta offering, there are some downsides and issues.

Ironically, one of the current issues with TypePad Connect is comment management. Even though comments are not stuck on a specific blog, comments are still stuck within TypePad Connect. Allowing users to export comments is on the roadmap, but in the beta version, all comments are currently being held on the TypePad Connect servers. That's a concern.

There's also the opposite problem: there's currently no way to import comments into TypePad Connect. That means if you're starting a blog from scratch, you'll be fine, but if you're adding TypePad Connect to an existing blog, you're going to have an old comment database and a new one. So you'll be managing two sets of comments.

That said, it's a beta. It's expected to have flaws.

Verdict

TypePad Connect definitely has a vision for a far more grand offering than the current beta. No doubt, pressure - be that pressure from users asking for the functionality or pressure from competitors like Automattic (which has begun to amalgamate the ingredients for a similar offering with Gravatar and IntenseDebate) - necessitated Six Apart moving sooner rather than later.

But when it comes right down to it, it's the vision in which I believe. I think Six Apart has a chance to provide a compelling solution for a common problem, even if they're not quite there yet. And once they begin to get closer to that vision, it could change the way we think about managing our conversations online.

Vision aside, would I implement this solution today? To be honest, I'd be hesitant to adopt TypePad Connect on an existing blog until some of the beta kinks are worked out. But if I were starting a new blog today? TypePad Connect would definitely be in the running for my centralized commenting system - even though I wouldn't be starting that blog on one of Six Apart's platforms.

If you're interested in trying it, TypePad Connect offers native support for Blogger, Movable Type 3.x and 4.x, Tumblr, TypePad, WordPress.org 2.0 and higher. It can also support any other installation with a chunk of javascript. Support for additional platforms are planned once the offering comes out of beta.