We're happy to say that today Disqus will put the feature on general release, calling it "social media reactions". If you use Disqus to manage comments on your blog, simply head to the "Admin and Settings" page on Disqus.com and enable "Social Media Reactions". Note that Disqus is still populating these today, so the reactions will not turn up in your comments right away - nonetheless, enabling this will make sure you get the feature as soon as it's fully enabled.
One Month In: Mashable's Experience of Social Media Comments
If you're a blogger, you probably understand why social media comments are so appealing: your posts are being shared extensively on social media sites, making it hard to see all the discussions in one place. This is the problem we ran into, and the reason we approached Disqus about pushing ahead with Social Media Comments.
So is the problem solved? Not completely, but it's a great first step. Mashable posts reliably pull in Tweets and Digg comments, although of course there's a delay while all those comments are found and added to the post - don't expect it to be instant. It might also be nice to enable replies to social media comments, treating external comments much like those left directly on the blog.
In short, social media comments currently work like trackbacks: they're a great way to find who's talking about a blog post, but you'll still need to leave the blog in order to reply. That's the next step I think.
The Feature List: A Reminder
What can social media comments do? Here's a quick reminder of the services supported:
Blogger - Locates Blogger posts linking to the source post and comments on those posts
Digg - Finds submission(s) linking to the source post and comments on that submission
Flickr - Finds comments / text on Flickr linking to the source post
FriendFeed - Finds links to the source post and also comments on those links
Movable Type - Finds blog posts linking to the source post and comments on those posts
Picasa - Finds comments linking to the source post
Twitter - Finds Tweets linking to source post
TypePad - Finds blog posts linking to the source post and comments on those posts
Vimeo - Finds comments linking to the source post
Wordpress - Finds blog posts linking to the source post and comments on those posts
YouTube - Finds comments linking to the source post
What Do You Think?