This week Automattic have acquired Intensedebate, and Disqus have announced the release of their public API. This has got me thinking.

I’ve previously felt that these 3rd party bolt-ons are of little real value to the blogging world, and for self-hosted blogs I still fell there is some merit in that. The featureset for Intensedebate is:

  • Comment threading
  • Reply by e-mail
  • Importing / Exporting
  • Commenter profiles
  • Reputation points and voting
  • Moderation / Blacklisting
  • Widgets
  • RSS Tracking
  • Twitter
  • Friendfreed
  • Open ID
  • Gravatar
  • HTML Formatting

The Disqus feature set seems to be broadly the same.

So where is the value? None of these features is particularly interesting in and of itself; even when combined, the additional features don’t massively enhance commenting over the features that can (and have) been built into WordPress by the core team and plugin authors.

The real benefit is in meta-data.

Imagine being able to find the other blogs that your commenters have in common, and from there the blogs the commenters on the first set share in common, and you start to see the picture.

Now tie that data to one of the largest content networks out there, WordPress.com. Now you can connect those commenters with data about the content of those blogs, pre-categorised and tagged for easy use. Suddenly owning that kind of data really makes sense. If Facebook’s future is in search, then perhaps so is the future of WordPress.

This clearly makes sense for Automattic, and I imagine they will be able to use that data to provide some new services, or enhance the ones they have, Akismet in particular, but for those running self-hosted installations I am still uncertain as to the value.

It seems, to some extent, that this is yet another opportunity to give away your data for the benefit of others so each blog owner is going to have to ask themselves whether the added value it brings is worth more than the value you are giving away. Even if you can’t monotise that data yourself you want to be sure to get value when you ’sell’ it on.

I for one won’t be jumping on the 3rd Party Boat until I see something a little more exciting; how about you?