After reading yet another post about the value of comments and public discussions (I believe it was Fred Wilson''s post), I thought "Why isn''t there a decentralized method of gathering a person''s comments on the web?" Services such as Disqus and IntenseDebate allow users to post on multiple sites with one account, but require the service to be set up on the blog site. Why not have a standardized way of collecting a person''s comments on any item, regardless of what application the originating site uses or what service the commenter uses?
Here''s how I envision it working: A user creates an account with an identity provider (e.g. OpenID, Facebook, etc.); she then provides a comment pingback address or is given one by the identity provider. When this user then leaves a comment at another site ("originating site") - logged in through the third party identity service - the originating site then "pings" (sends a POST request) to the comment pingback address it received from the identity provider as part of the user information. This ping would include the comment, the URL of the comment or the item to which the comment was directed, and perhaps other pertinent information.
User---------------------[comment]---------------->Originating site
Originating site-----[identity request]------>Identity provider
Originating site<---[confirm identity]--------Identity provider
Originating site<---[pingback address]----Identity provider
Originating site-----[comment data]------->Pingback address
My thoughts right now are that it would be
- Similar in function to a Trackback or pingback
- Tied to an identification system, such as OpenID
- Standardized and simple enough to be implemented quickly on virtually any site
Now I''m not real familiar with the OpenID spec, but I would like to see this comment pingback address be an optional extension of OpenID. The whole system described here is person-centric, and it makes sense to connect it to identity.
The advantage of using this decentralized protocol is that users don''t need additional accounts with the various comment services. I realize that some of the comment services already accept OpenID or other identities, but with comment "pinging", the comments can be aggregated at a site of the user''s choosing, and there is no need to go "claim" comments.
One final issue is security and spam prevention. My idea for this is to provide a unique pingback URL for each login or for each identity consumer (originating site).