Disqus Leaves Me Feeling Shot Put

A couple of weeks ago I "upgraded" my blog comments to Disqus from those native to Typepad.  Disqus is part of a crop of new startups that are trying to create businesses out of what previously were "features" for larger companies (I posted on this earlier).

And I have to confess, the new Disqus comments are definitely better than my old ones, as evidenced by more/better comments.  That said, there is one major issue that I’m struggling with.  Disqus apparently doesn’t support migration of historical comments from Typepad (but apparently they do for WordPress).

This is actually pretty disappointing.  I’ve now got comments on my blog on both platforms and am stuck.  Should I stay or switch back? Will they support it in the future? I should have known this before installing (and I’m sure it was in the fine print somewhere), but the instructions were misleading.  And getting help from Disqus is tough.  [A funny story: the best support I’ve had is when I posted a gripe comment on venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s blog (he posted about his investment in Disqus) and the company CEO replied several times.  LOL.]

To be successful these features-that-want-to-be-businesses need to over deliver on the customer experience.  It just has to be way too good and way too easy to get enough people to switch that there is value for the company.  The jury is still out on Disqus…

UPDATE: I’m not sure where I came up with the association between Disqus and Discus (as in the picture and the post title). But I now know that it’s pronounced “discuss” just spelled cool (I’m a fan of Qs).

UPDATE 2: Over the past week I’ve been very impressed with Disqus’ customer support. As I mentioned, there isn’t a standard tool to migrate old Typepad comments to Disqus but the good folks at Disqus took a custom export I did and wrote a script to import them. So now I’ve got all of my comments on Discus and am lovin’ it! Thanks Andrew!