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Coincidentally, two similar products - Disqus and IntenseDebate - have both opened to the public today. Both are competitors to Co.mments, CoComment and others - for a comprehensive review read our article about comment trackers - and both try to establish a centralized platform for users to track their comments across a number of websites, services and blogs.

Disqus aggregates all your comments into a sort of personal forum, which allows users to create new posts and topics not connected to other sites or blogs. This is actually a fantastic idea. Perhaps you’re not interested much in tracking your comments, but if you were able to have everything you wrote on other sites, ever, into one big personal messageboard, why wouldn’t you?

There is, of course, a catch - for this to work, the site you’re commenting on must be Disqus-enabled, which means that Disqus’ rate of success will depend greatly on the willingness of blogs to accept this platform. In practice, it will consist of placing a javascript snippet on your blog: currently, WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger are supported, and Movable Type as well as general OpenID support are in the works.

Now should be the time when I point out differences between the two products, but the fact is, the ideas behind them are very similar. Intense Debate is also a code snippet (a bit more elegant since it’s in the form of a plugin) which anyone with a Wordpress, Blogger, or Typepad blog (or just any regular web site) can add to participate. OpenID is supported.

On the commenter side, while there is no “centralized forum” that aggregates your comments, you can use Intense Debate to download all your comments in XML form and do whatever you like with it. Other features include threading, reputation ratings which will be attached to commenter’s identity, and syndication of your comments across all the Intense Debate blogs you comment on.

Both sites have very interesting ideas and seem to leap ahead the current competitors, none of which have ever managed to catch very serious traction. But, the fact that both systems need to be adopted by bloggers first, and commenters second, mean that they have an uphill battle ahead of them. Personally, I haven’t yet found a comment aggregation platform that would fully satisfy all my needs; I hope that at least one of these two products manages to do so.

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