Disqus Dumps Voting and Implements Likes

Disqus T-Shirt Found in BenSpark's Big Box of ...
Image by BenSpark via Flickr

Just caught a Tweet from Daniel Ha mentioning a new Disqus upgrade. Looks like they’ve dumped their normal ratings system for something more like FriendFeed, allowing you to Like comments. This just goes to show that FriendFeed hit the nail on the head with that simple feature as Facebook and 12seconds.tv (bumps) have both also implemented something similar.

How to Upgrade

I thought I would be able to simply go into my WP admin interface and automatically upgrade the plugin, but it turned out to not be that easy. I wasn’t given any notification that the plugin had an update available. When I accessed the Search/Install interface and searched for Disqus, I saw the updated version, but WP told me my current version was newer. I’m not sure what logic they’re using, but 2.0-xxx is definitely not newer than 2.1-xxx in my book.

I had to uninstall the version I had and manually install the new plugin.

Other Notes

According to the Disqus blog, this update speeds up Disqus in all browsers:

  • Internet Explorer is up to 5x faster
  • FireFox is up to 3x faster
  • Webkit (Safari and Chrome), and Opera is up to 2x faster

There is also a Media menu that allows you to post a video comment (via Seesmic) and Disqus indicates more media functionality may be on the way.

I’m hoping specifically for 12seconds.tv support since that would make video commentators get to the point in a hurry (12 seconds, to be exact) and not ramble on for 20 minutes. This might actually make video comments feasible to view for the average person. As it stands, people avoid looking at video comments like the plague.

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Did You Get Caught Trying to Boost Your Follower Count?

punkdTwitter is gaining popularity, attracting people of all types. They talked about Twitter on The View. George Stephanopoulos interviewed twitterviewed John McCain. P. Diddy has jumped in with both feet, keeping us updated and motivated (Let’s Go!!!). As always, with great power comes great responsibility…wait…I mean when a social service’s numbers blow up, most of them are probably just spammers and other types of marketers.

There is nothing wrong with marketing in social media. It’s a good place to establish your brand and make connections. The problems arise when the marketers start Doing It Wrong(tm). It’s almost disrespectful. Maybe I’m just sensitive.

Twitter Isn’t a Mailing List

We could go back and forth on this point all day long, but you’d still be wrong. Twitter is not your own personal mailing list. Let me restrict the parameters to make this more clear:

  • A standard network or Internet marketer sets up a mailing list attached to some kind of auto-responder.
  • The auto-responder is stuffed with a bunch of emails scheduled to fire off at specified intervals.
  • The goal here is to move your target to action without you lifting a finger.

Problem with that is, when someone subscribes to your mailing list, they usually expect this will be the case. When someone follows you on Twitter, they expect to see you updating your status. Not pitching them on your product.

The proliferation of services that will schedule tweets and shoot out automated messages to Twitter just illustrates my point here. We all know how I feel about social media automation.

Your Followers Aren’t Following You

Many network marketers and “small-business” owners have purchased leads before. The selling point on these always mentions something like “pre-qualified” or “targetted.” Anything that makes you think the the people on these lists are interested in what you have.

Once you start contacting these leads, you quickly realize that these people mostly want nothing to do with you. They were probably careless with their email address, or filled out some survey where one of the questions asked them if they had an interest in making money from home. Who doesn’t want to make money from home?

There are a bunch of services popping up which allow you to build your followers list automatically. Now, anyone can have thousands of followers without investing any time in Twitter at all. All they have to do is signup or opt-in and all the other people that have signed up and opted-in follow you just as you follow them.

Am I the only one that sees a pattern here? Nobody who signs up for these follower-generation services cares what you have to say. They don’t want to buy your crap or join your business. Just like you, they’re trying to get a bunch of followers on their “list” so that they can pitch their crap.

You Just Got Punk’d

So, you’ve signed up with this service, probably given up your Twitter credentials and the whole nine, and the only connections you’re going to make are with people who want to sell you something. Not only that, guess who makes out like a bandit? The service you signed up for. They played on your greed and now they have your contact info and twitter credentials. Not only that, but I bet they will turn around and sell you out to the highest bidder.

You might as well start looking around for Ashton, cuz you have definitely been had. Is that a camera hidden in the corner there?

There are people who just don’t know any better. They just wanted a bunch of followers because that’s supposed to be the thing to do in social media. It’s supposed to increase your status and make you somebody. Well, it doesn’t and I’m sorry you were misinformed.

For you marketer-types, you need to step your game up and start doing things the right way. If you’re going to be lazy about it and try to take shortcuts, you may as well quit now. You’ll never last. Also, you won’t make any money.

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12seconds.tv Scratches the Surface of Twitter Integration

12secondstweetbox

I got an email from 12seconds.tv the other day about their new Tweetbox feature. 12seconds is basically the Twitter of video, allowing you to post quick 12s videos via web or mobile. Their Tweetbox feature grabs the latest tweet about your 12seconds video and displays it on your profile.

Oh how we love Twitter!  We love it so much that we’ve decided to create a special feature that allows your Twitter friends to publicly comment on your videos.  All they have to do is include the Tiny12 link from your video in their tweet and we’ll automatically pull it in and put it right into your TweetBox.  You can find your TweetBox sitting right on your home and channel page.

12seconds Gets It Right

You can probably think of a million services that post to Twitter for you. Why do they always make this the priority? I can think of a few reasons:

  • From a developer stand-point, posting to Twitter is easy once I have your credentials
  • Posting a link to my service in your Twitter stream helps my service gain popularity
  • Some integration with Twitter, however half-assed, leads users to believe your service is on the bleeding edge

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing any service that makes an effort to integrate with other services, but there is a piece missing here that always bothers me. This is especially true of services like FriendFeed and Pikchur, where comments enrich the value of the service.

Discussion Fragmentation…Again

Let’s talk about FriendFeed. I import my updates from Twitter. People that see my item in FriendFeed have the option to comment on it. They also have the option to have that comment sent to me as a reply on Twitter.

What ends up happening is I get the reply in Twitter and continue the discussion on Twitter. Meanwhile, back on FriendFeed, there is a bunch of discussion going on that doesn’t get sent through Twitter. Not only that, but the discussion I’m having on Twitter doesn’t go back through FriendFeed. So, I’ve created two separate discusion threads from the same FriendFeed item.

What would be great is for FriendFeed to grab items from Twitter that are in-reply-to FriendFeed items. I’m not sure of the technical details here, but I think it’s possible. I also think it’s possibly difficult, but I have my blogger hat on right now, so I’ll leave the technical discussion alone for now.

12seconds Could Do It Better

As it stands, 12seconds only grabs the single latest tweet about your videos and displays it on your channel page. There is no Tweetbox on the individual video pages. The context of the comment is pretty much stripped away as it’s unclear which video the tweet is about. The remedy for this would be to grab all tweets about a specific video and display them as comments on that video’s page.

12seconds has set themselves up for success here because they can simply (again, speaking as just a blogger) grab any tweets that mention their URL’s and correlate them to their user’s and videos using their own database.

FriendFeed also has it’s own URL shortening service and could possible do something similar. I believe the Twitter API also includes a method to find out what tweets are in-reply-to other tweets, so there should be a way to grab entire threads of tweets that correspond to FriendFeed items and apply them as comments for those items.

Obviously, this is mostly speculation, but if we don’t attempt to do what might seem impossible,  all this will get boring real quick.