Talk about from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.

Fred’s got a post up talking about the “mainstreaming” of 3rd party comment system. His graph compares their portfolio company disqus, with a bunch of companies I’ve never heard of.

Made me wonder what HaloScan was up to. Remember HaloScan? From back before Grey Matter or Blogger had comments? It popped up in that nasty little window, and generally sucked. And we all received early painful lessons in outsourcing control of pieces of your infrastructure. And then Moveable Type shipped with decent integrated comments (and just about the slickest looking admin interface anyone had ever seen anywhere on the Web) Apparently they’ve been acquired by this (js-kit)[http://js-kit.com] company. And their traffic is still growing!?!?!

Here’s a graph looking at disqus, HaloScan and js-kit:

With those numbers I’m not sure we’re talking mainstream here, though its interesting to see Wordpress picking up intense-debate. I like WordPress’s corporate culture and they seem well suited for not stifling innovation in acquisitions.

But really all I wanted to say is whether or not this stuff is interesting to mainstream, as a hacker a 3rd party comment system is golden. Because we’ve all rolled our own blogging systems, and you either never built the comments, turned them off, gave up and went back to an off the shelf system, or are running some sadomasochistic social experiment. The great thing about decent 3rd party comment systems is you can go back to your bash/Perl/XSLT/file tree based system, and still have comments. (Leonard was the first alpha geek I noticed doing this)

And Disqus even has to start of a decent API. More focused at “forum owner”, individual commenters could use some love, and of course the whole thing could benefit from a standardized delegated auth model, but those are nits.

(btw. where are the Wikipedia articles on that early blogging era tech, our legacy is being lost! OMG!)