David Cuenca wrote:
Perhaps also relevant: http://wapo.st/1vXz9nb
--- Washington Post, New York Times and Mozilla team up for new Web site comment system ---
I read about this earlier this week. I thought it was a bit strange for these companies to be seemingly fixed on building their own tool. I got the impression that this foundation simply had money to burn. It also wasn't clear to me whether the project would be open source or not, though given that it includes Mozilla, I'm somewhat hopeful.
Jeff Atwood has been working on http://www.discourse.org. I haven't been following the project too closely, but it feels as though it's trying to solve at least some of the same problems.
There are also tools such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus, which due to privacy considerations wouldn't be good for sites such as Wikimedia wikis. But for older publishers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, who already try to track every visitor with a dozen or more tracking pixels and cookies and whatever else, this wouldn't really be an issue and it's already a fairly popular and well-known tool.
This isn't to say that this new endeavor is focusing on an easy problem or a problem that doesn't need additional attention. Global communication is a very tough nut to crack, without a doubt. But it feels like some of these efforts aren't working with each other to achieve the same goals, and that's a bit frustrating and annoying. Putting $3.89 million into improving an existing tool (or tools) seems like a better use of money than creating yet another tool, in my opinion.
MZMcBride