There are a lot of new tools online that one can ask that question of. FriendFeed and Ping.fm come to mind as ambitious attempts to integrate content consumption and production, respectively, across multiple services. FriendFeed allows users to aggregate their various streams of personal activity and that of their friends for access through a single interface. Ping.fm allows users to corss-post original content on dozens of different services from a single interface. Those are interesting ideas, but the problem is that it still requires an additional interface, even it’s the one intended to obviate the need for continued accumulation of them.

What makes DISQUS different and potentially very exciting is because it might actually offer a way to simplify the social web rather than simply add to its conundrums. Moreover, it deals with something so basic that even the non early-adopter set might be interested in getting on board: Commenting.

Comments are a nice idea but they’re a mess. Different platforms use different accounts and people’s responses are littered across the web haphazardly without anyway to incorporate them into a more coherent online self. DISQUS’s idea is to replace native comment functionality on sites (primarily blogs; ones on WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, or Tumblr) with their own system and keep that system integrated with other tools like Facebook Friend Connect. The result is a situation where someone can comment using a DISQUS identity, a Facebook identity, an on-the-fly identity, or others (to come as the service evolves). Not only that, DISQUS brags integration with FriendFeed and includes a reblogging function that automatically posts a full blog post in response to a comment from the commenting interface to any blog on the platforms DISQUS currently supports. DISQUS also allows registered users to follow each others comments and allows comment threading and ranking.

So there’s a lot going on. Often times that makes something less attractive on the web—the more bells and whistles something has the greater the necessary investment of energy for new users to figure it out and actually use it. What makes DISQUS a little different is that whatever else it ight offer, the basic commenting functionality that it introduces is no more complicated than any other similar tool. For visitors who just want to comment as they’ve done in the past, DISQUS is no particular burden.

That’s one reason we’ve turned it on for the SnapDragon blog. Or rather, a reason we didn’t not turn it on. The other factor in that category is that DISQUS supports importing existing comments from WordPress and even exporting comments from the DISQUS system back into WordPress’s native comment management tool. So there’s not much downside to trying out DISQUS and it’s always possible to go back to how things were in hurry if it ends up disappointing.

But the big affirmative reason for trying out DISQUS is their recently debuted “Social Media Comments” functionality. Reflecting a pretty savvy approach both to product testing and product promotion, DISQUS premiered its new features on the popular social media and technology blog Mashable! where it’s sure to a) be seen by influencers and b) be tested by the most social media prone users on the web. Here’s Mashable!’s description:

Go on, Tweet this post. Or share it on Friend. Or post about it on Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad or WordPress blogs. Or link to it from a Flickr comment. Or comment on the story on Digg. Or add a comment linking to this post from YouTube, Vimeo or Picasa.

You can talk about this post on almost every major social service (with more being added all the time) and we’ll include these comments below the post. That’s the magic of a new feature we’re implementing on Mashable: Social Media Comments.

Today Mashable is announcing an exclusive partnership with the blog comment service Disqus with regard to their integration of the comment aggregation service UberVU. For the next two weeks, you’ll be able to test Disqus-powered social media comments exclusively on Mashable, getting a glimpse at what both companies think is the future of blog comments. Of course we also have to thank UberVU for powering this comment aggregation feature.

Wow. Consider how much better organized the social web would be if comments on new content and responses to new content on other platforms ceased to be totally different categories of contribution. It would be an enormous set towards making the “discussion” metaphor for the social web actually apt (earning the company, I suppose, their name).

There are other players in this field, but it looks like DISQUS is starting to pull away from the pack:

(Yes, we know Google Trends isn’t quite science, but it’ll do for now.)

Another feature of the new version of DISQUS rolled out on Mashable! makes clear, I think, why this tool might have a future:

As an extra special feature, Disqus users posting comments to Mashable can now syndicate their comments to Twitter – simply go to your Disqus account settings and enable Twitter.

And who doesn’t love Twitter these days? The point isn’t that close integration with Twitter is such a commenting killer app that DISQUS is a certain success. Rather, they’ve found more than a few ways to actually make life on the social web easier for users by including functionality that complements existing behavior patterns. Yes, certainly, people respond to things they read online on Twitter. In fact, why would you leave your comment stuck on the bottom of a post page rather than out in the twitterverse where your friends will see it? But that’s too bad though, because people reading that blog post who don’t know you won’t hear what you have to say. DISQUS has the power to fix that and a whole host of other examples of specific rendundancies between “commenting” (as derivative responses to existing content) and responding on another platform.

So we’re going to give it a try around here and see what happens.