Targeting disqus

I think Google should (and possibly already is) looking at disqus as an acquisition target.

Why? Well for one, I would be.

So Google just came out with a new development for their beta product Google Reader. Users can now include messages on the items they share. I’ve been sharing items for a little while and I really enjoy reading the news that my friends deem “important” enough to share. But sometimes sharing itself is not enough. Sometimes you want to include why you are sharing this particular piece of information or any insights you might have on the subject. So a great step forward for Google Reader.

This development really was the next logical step for Reader, and it should have been developed a lot earlier. We need more than just notes, we need conversation. According to Duncan Riley “The ability to have a discussion around shared feeds is still missing, but/ is being developed by Google.”

The importance lays in the fact that comment systems are arguably becoming more important than the actual blog posts they are built on. I had a brief comment/reply exchange with another blogger (PH Bradley) about this. He suggested that comment platforms, specifically disqus, were akin to parasites living off of blogging platforms. Bottom line, if parasites become powerful enough they kill their host which is how he was arguing in favor of a vertical integration upwards from a comment platform.

I think the parasite analogy is right on target, and it should be the natural evolution of things. Here you have Google who with two platforms, an RSS reader and a blogging platform, is trying to weave a social web between them. If done properly a better solution might be to simply acquire discuss and integrate it fully into blogger and Google Reader.

This would be in line with Google’s general strategy of acquiring early stage startups, and it would provide a much more robust social web based on its existing products.

As a user I think I would benefit from this. I’m already using Firefox’s disqus add-on to comment on blogs directly from Google Reader, however, it would all be much simpler if the comment platform were directly integrated in the first place.

Any thoughts?

Another thing that should be integrated are email platforms and virtual rooms. Take Gmail and Google Groups. I use both but wish I could just have a space within Gmail that would do version tracking of documents I share with my groups. Browser add-ons like Xoopit have taken the first steps, but a fully integrated virtual room within Gmail would be so nice to have.