A New Standard For Comments
Any new technology will eventually have social elements arbitrarily grafted on, it’s the way of today’s web. To an extent, this makes sense; people are becoming more social, and want to share most of what they do online, but it’s important to consider the way in which social elements are implemented.
Social feed readers have been around for almost as long as RSS, usually allowing users of a particular feed reader to discuss a post amongst themselves. This isn’t a particularly user-friendly system of commenting because it isolates the commenters from the primary discussion - the one occuring on the blog. This brings me to my point:
Feed reader comments are implemented this way because it is almost impossible to integrate with blogs. Everyone uses a different commenting system, not all blogs provide a feed of comments or otherwise make their comments accessible, and none that I know of provide the ability to comment from a third party site.
Ideally, a feed reader would display all comments for a post, along with a comment form to allow the reader to join in without leaving the page. Unfortunately, for such a feed reader to ever become a reality, there would have to be no more than a few comment standards, preferably just one, used by the vast majority of sites.
This standardization of commenting systems is gradually becoming a reality with services like Disqus and IntenseDebate, but these offer no extended functionality; they would need to provide the ability to post comments from a third party site to enable such an idealized feed reader.
This may seem like a lot of trouble, and it is, but it would be very beneficial to all concerned. Users would be able to add their comments, and read others’, without having to visit every individual site, and blogs would gain more comments by feed subscribers, who are likely among their more devoted followers, adding value to their stories.
This isn’t likely to occur for some time yet, but it would only take one platform creating a standard to kick start the change. WordPress, I’m looking at you.
APIs, Blogs, Feed Readers, RSS
I like the idea that you could potentially comment without having to visit every site, but don’t you think that, that might pave the way for spammers? One drop list where you could comment others blogs sounds prospective. However I am not that familiar with the services that you speak of or the context of the comment system. But it is pretty intresting.
You raise a good point, I hadn’t considered spam. I suppose, if it were to happen, it would become a bit like email - you couldn’t practically operate without a spam filter.
Alternatively, or in conjunction, perhaps third party sites could require users to complete a captcha in order to comment, though this would significantly detract from usability.