One decision we had to make early on in the planning of ReadBurner was whether or not to build our own commenting system or to use a third-party. While there were some benefits of building our own – primarily, the fact that we’d “own” the content – in the long-run, it seemed that choosing a third-party – specifically Disqus – was by far the better decision for users. Here’s a few reasons why, and how you can use Disqus to both build up your online reputation and increase traffic to your social media profiles.

1. It’s a good commenting system: at its core, Disqus is just a good commenting system. It’s threaded, which makes it easier to follow conversations, and it doesn’t require registration and even supports OpenID. Building this on our own would’ve taken weeks.

2. Users get to own their comments: this is really important. When you comment on any blog that uses Disqus, the comment becomes part of your Disqus profile (for example, disqus.com/adamostrow or disqus.com/drewolanoff). This means that comments you leave on ReadBurner, WinExtra, Mathew Ingram, or any thousands of the other blogs using Disqus all show up on your profile, and in the RSS feed that Disqus offers so you can manipulate them, create widgets, etc. And, since Disqus has a built-in vote-up/vote-down feature, you can also build up your commenting reputation.

3. Social media profiles: Although it’s not another lifestreaming service (yet), Disqus does let you add your various social media profiles to your account (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.). This means whenever you mouse over someone’s profile picture on a Disqus comment, you can quickly navigate to their various profiles to learn more about them. It’s a built in social function that connects people and hence rewards you for commenting.

4. Built-in community: Disqus also has community features. Through the ReadBurner community, you can see who our top commenters are, recent comments across the site, and browse the profiles of other people who comment here. Also, with a Disqus account you can “follow” different people and see what comments they are leaving not only on ReadBurner, but on other blogs around the Web. We can also integrate these features right into your own site through RSS feeds and widgets – something we plan to do in the near future.

5. Streamback (future): This is something that we mentioned back at launch, but eventually Disqus will provide the ability for comments posted on ReadBurner (or any third-party aggregator) to show up on the originating blog as well. This makes blog publishers happy, and gives commenters more bang for their buck since they get to be a part of two communities for the price of one.

I’m already finding that I’m much more inclined to comment on a blog that uses Disqus than one that does not. Anecdotally, it also seems that blogs using Disqus are receiving more comments that use their own proprietary comments system, though I haven’t yet seen numbers on it.

I think in the long-run, users will start demanding that blogs switch over to a third-party service (or support OpenID), because after all, they are the ones producing the comments, and they should own them and reap the rewards of participating.

Of course, before someone cries “hypocrisy!” because we aren’t yet using Disqus on this blog, we’ll just tell you that it’s high up on the list :-)

_adam