The new service backtype which aggregates comments and allows you to follow them a bit like friendfeed or twitter is further proof for me that authenticated commenting needs to be pushed further up everyones priority list.
backtype are currently scraping the posts for comments (bit like CoComment does via their plugin) so that they can pickup the URL of the user who posted it, they have to do this because RSS / ATOM feeds do not contain the URL. The problem with this is three fold,
- The commentator must be consistent about the URL they leave.
- Because the URL is not authenticated it means people can imposonate others very easily (which happens a lot more than people think!)
- If the blog does not require you to enter a URL it wont work at all, we removed the requirement in fav.or.it to enter a URL when we realised that this was a major barrier to our mass market audience (we have 80% Internet Explorer users now) This is because outside our world of blogs most people do not have a URL to pin their names too.
Authenticated
Because of the above concerns we chose to work with the RSS/ATOM feeds + API’s available from each service, this means for sites that do support authentication we then get the data that allows us to confirm real ownership of the comments. For instance Louis Gray has DISQUS installed on his blog (along with 30,000+ other blogs) so via the DISQUS API we get back the comments in a format that allows us to identify each user (as seen here)
Blogger also supplies the same information – so again if you look here you will see those who left comments via their blogger accounts show up as authenticated users. Our users can claim each of those individual identities (Disqus, blogger, etc) and join them together, this includes the ability to claim your OpenID which although useful for login purposes does not help with commenting.
The reason for this is that although I can use my OpenID via Blogger (and other commenting services) to leave a comment, once left the comment data is not then exposed back out via the comment feed.
Working Together
The work we have started is still just a partial solution to the problem and I am sure that others like backtype would welcome any moves to improve the identity aspects of commenting. Given the number of companies getting involved I do believe we will start to see change over the next 6-12 months and given the right push from the right people/companies the formats for storing identity information within RSS / ATOM could be standardized.
OpenID is certainly not the only solution and we need a strong workgroup with representatives not just from the commenting companies but also from all the major blogging platforms because we need their support to then expose this information via the feeds they supply.
As usual if you want quicker updates on what we are doing at fav.or.it follow me on twitter.
Hey Nick,
We absolutely agree that authenticated commenting is a good thing. A few things of note, BackType does very little scraping. ATOM feeds _do_ contain urls and we do make use of APIs that allow to ensure authenticated comments.
This is still something we are working on and is one of the reasons why we like systems like Disqus and IntenseDebate.
Hi Mike,
I was being general on the Feed side, as ATOM/RSS are so abused anyway that just because a specification says it includes something does not mean anyone conforms to it. But for us the URL was never a good means to identify the commentor purely because it can be abused, so we are very black and white on this, either its anonymous or its properly authenticated.
For the mass market (the only thing we care about) url’s are a no go anyway (as stated in the post) – but as more platforms are making their identity available through API’s (e.g. Facebook + Myspace) I see a good future for comenting.