Last week we posted about DISQUS (or is it Disqus? It’s not entirely clear), a commenting engine that ties together discussion from across places on the Web. We’ve added to our site so you can see it in action below. Visitors can comment without an account, with a DISQUS account, or with Facebook Friend Connect. We were exctied by this prospect alone—making it easier for people to leave comments makes it that much more likely that the will and thus adds a bit more energy to online discussions. This week DISQUS went live with an even more exciting feature that they’d been previewing already for a bit, Social Media Reactions:

We were introducing Social Media Reactions, a new feature on Disqus that aims to connect the discussion on your site with the scattered conversations occurring everywhere else on the web. Today, people have many tools available to discover, read, and discuss great content. Blog posts and articles can be mentioned on Twitter, commented about on Digg, and even shared across FriendFeed. Now, these social media reactions can be connected back to your site keeping the conversation together. When your posts are being discussed on Twitter and Digg, these tweets and comments will appear within your Disqus powered comment thread. [Emphasis Added]

There are a lot of things that splice and dice online activity streams together, but this is a lot different. The content being generated isn’t organized by who created it or even who they intended to send it to, but by what it responds to, what it’s about. Suppose you post a link to this blog entry to twitter and direct that tweet specifically to one of your friends on that network telling them you thought they’d be interested in it. In a world of DISQUS’s Social Media Reactions that activity would be apparent to an entirely other person looking at this blog post. Maybe they have something to add to discussion that’s going on about this post on Twitter; they’d have never known it was happening before. All of a sudden a lot of fractured communication about a single piece of content starts to weave together and the people involved become exposed to each other on the basis of what they’re responding to online, regardless of how they choose to respond.

That’s the sort of thing we think the Social Web should be about. New technology should be leveraged to make it as easy as possible for people to create, share, and discuss material in whatever way and with whatever interface they choose. So because we liked how DISQUS seemed to be thinking we thought we’d take a look at some of the tools that DISQUS was establishing integration with that we weren’t already familiar with, assuming they probably had good taste.

That’s how we came across Squarespace. By their own description, they “make software that helps you manage your online life. Squarespace is publishing redefined.” That’s not as much of an exaggeration as it sounds. Squarespace does offer an extremely impressive online publishing platform. It can handle anything from a simple personal blog to a large and active content-driven community. The interface itself is also quite remarkable. The site template can be edited live on the web in such a way that even someone unfamiliar with the technical end of web design can style a site to quite a high level of detail. While users are logged in, “edit this” icons appear for all content that user is authorized to change (oh, yes, there are multiple levels of of user—even custom ones). There’s more to talk about in terms of user experience, but it’s not the most interesting part.

That might be the fact that Squarespace is offering a paid service (gasp!). Their publishing software is proprietary and they host all the Square sites themselves. There’s a 14 day free trial but after that users have five options, none of them free:

(I include the screen grab in part to emphasize a bit of their design sensibilitiy, which is also worth positive mention.)

Unlike the vast majority of Web 2.0 success that get talked about these days, no one is ever going to have to loudly speculate about how Squarespace is going to monetize their business. Like a traditional offline venture, they’re actually selling something, not giving something away for free and waiting to figure out the rest later. One reason that’s good is it means they have to make sure that their product is the best; they have to convince people to spend money rather than go with a free site on Wordpress.com of anywhere else. It’s nice that a company’s main incentive is to make a better product rather than figure out how to sell ads. And it seems to have worked out pretty well for the likes of 37Signals where as the alternative is still sort of wishful thinking.

In addition to being highly customizable and scalable from small to large-ish sites, Squarespace also shares some of DISQUS’s next generation social web DNA (See also their interesting staff social media page evidence of this). Individual posts added to blog format pages include, by default a “share this” button to make content more likely to spread. But in addition, on individual post pages there are these links after the post:

The screen grab in this instance is for illustrating more than just good (aesthetic) design. Having these links after a post does a lot to help content get shared by visitors that are unlikely to do so using a “share this” button or anything that requires using a social media sharing service. These links, presented in this simple and straightforward way, facilitate sharing by less web-savvy users the same way social sharing service buttons do for more web-savvy ones.

There’s also the ability to create a “social profile” for a Squarespace account, integrating with all the most popular social web services. Like DISQUS, this helps facilitate unified communication across online platforms.

There’s more to say and we’ll revisit Squarespace, all it has to offer, and what it and similarly innovative services might mean for online publication.