Disqus' Partner Strategy: Is FriendFeed Integration Up Next?

Today's news on SezWho's acquisition of Tejit stirred up, appropriately, a number of conversations around the Web regarding blog commenting platforms, and comparisons between SezWho and Disqus were common. But while some tried to paint the two products as competition, Disqus founder Daniel Ha publicly looked to open talks with SezWho, while, elsewhere, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit confirmed that he's reached out to the Disqus team to make conversations on the popular social aggregation site two-way, which could mark yet another important name on Disqus' growing list of successful partnerships.

In fact, I didn't have to look far to spot Daniel's conversation with Jitendra Gupta, the CEO of SezWho, for it happened in the comments section of my coverage this morning.

See: SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy: Comments

Although in coverage of the announcement both here and elsewhere, Gupta had made comments about Disqus' removing blog comments from the original site, and centralizing them on their own, rather than declare war against SezWho, Daniel instead played peacemaker, writing, "Congrats on the acquisition. Sounds like you guys are doing something a bit different than us. We should talk about doing something about this fragmentation. Game?"

This led to Jitendra's offering to grab drinks with Daniel, and the two now look like they're indeed game to set up a conversation which could lead to a great deal of collaboration between the two players.

Meanwhile, as FriendFeed continues its rapid growth, gaining significant mindshare, in part due to excitement displayed by top bloggers like Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Fred Wilson, Loic LeMeur, Thomas Hawk and Steve Rubel, the fact that comments on FriendFeed aren't also migrating to the author's blog posts hasn't sat well with everyone. It's uncommon that a few days can go by without one blogger or another begging to have the comments on FriendFeed come back to their site, whether through a blog plug-in or some other way. While I believe a community should be able to hold parallel conversations, not all agree.

Buchheit, in response to a post from Wilson titled Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out, said that he had reached out to Disqus to solve this commenting silo.

"I've been in contact with the Disqus team, and I hope to add the option to copy comments though to Disqus in the not too distant future," Buchheit wrote, also adding, as I believe, "Many of my (FriendFeed) comments aren't relevant in the original context... In many cases, (FriendFeed) is enabling new types of comments that would not (or should not) have occurred in the past."

By forging a partnership with Disqus, FriendFeed users could comment on FriendFeed items, and have comments also post to the originating blog, just as other services, including Fav.or.it and Plaxo have implemented. Combined with the recent introduction of video comments from Seesmic, and the above conversation with SezWho, you can see Disqus' strategy develop, to be open to partnerships of all kinds, establishing their service as one of the most versatile, almost default, in the nascent comment replacement market. It's very smart, and one that will get them a lot of good will in a blogosphere ready to accept new, innovative, approaches to communication.

SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy

This morning, SezWho, a content rating and reputation management service, announced the acquisition of Tejit, a small company providing semantic analysis of user generated content through its discovery engine. The purchase is intended for SezWho to deliver even more precise reputation scores for contributors in an online conversation, honed by analysis of their activity throughout the Web, be it through blogs, forums or other social media.

In advance of the announcement, I had the opportunity to talk with SezWho's CEO, Jitendra Gupta, in a call Monday night, outlining the goals of the service, and how the combined offering will differentiate itself from services like Disqus. In our conversation, Gupta touched on many of the hot elements of the Web today, including distributed conversations, search engine optimization, and FriendFeed.

"Conversations are getting distributed, and the user organization is key," Gupta said. "Not even the New York Times controls the conversation across different sites and different people. Because of the democratization of Web 2.0 from blogs to Wikis, there is no one platform that will be the single platform because of the variety of tools that is available."

SezWho's goal, made stronger with the Tejit purchase, is to find out where these conversations are happening, no matter where they are, and build a reputation score for those engaged in discussion, to help others get a good idea for who they're dealing with.

"What we have to do is offer user-centric organization to where all these conversations are happening," Gupta said. "We say conversations are happening everywhere, but how can we make those better? Everybody is creating content. Who is credible and who's not? What is good and what is not good?"

Some of the core tenets of SezWho's offering are centered around keeping the power, including search engine optimization (SEO), with the blogger. While Disqus is a strong commenting platform and offers its own rating systems, the service has at times been criticized for hosting the comment activity off the blog itself, and instead, on Disqus' servers. For those who care about such things, they don't necessarily get the SEO benefit of the comments, which they might if they used Blogger, TypePad or WordPress' native commenting systems, each of which is supported by SezWho.

"We think there should not be one central repository, but we can instead be a useful benefit to the other sites," Gupta said. "From a Google point of view or Techmeme point of view, it's not clear that the content is fresh, or being updated. You're not benefiting from the SEO value."

The combined offering hopes to help you find out more about the person you're conversing with online, thanks to SezWho's tracking their activity and building a reputation and profile, based on their interactions on the many different sites throughout the Web. Tejit's offering will greatly increase the ability to get context around the data, and show how the reputaiton of one piece of content relates to another.

"We show these profiles around the people participating to show what else has this person done," Gupta said. "You don't want just connections, but credible connections. Who is this guy, and what is his credibility? We have the best reputation engine for establishing who is credible and who is not, and we take into account all the interactions on all these sites. We can interact and provide feedback, which leads to credible content discovery."

SezWho, prior to today's news, had 11 people, including 9 full-time employees, 2 part-time staffers, and a team of 4 engineers in India, and has raised just over $1 million in funding. Tejit is a 3-person company, and in the short time since its discovery engine was in service, it has already crawled more than 5 million blogs for analysis.