• Ubervu
• BackType
• TweetBacks
• Disqus
• ChatCatcher
• IntenseDebate

The idea is to bring all comments about your posts into the posts themselves in an effort to centralize the conversation. This seems like a great idea until you put it into practice.

The main problem with most, if not all, of these solutions is that Twitter tends to overpower the rest. What we need is an effective means of filtering Twitter for quality comments, otherwise they should not be pulled into the post at all.

Are people seriously going through the “Social Media Comments” of the comments section and scanning through them for quality input? Good luck finding any quality input from Twitter. Just for kicks, go to this mashable post and count the number of quality comments from Twitter about that post. You more than likely saw the ridiculous number of trackbacks and didn’t even bother counting.

But what if, for the time being, we just excluded Twitter from this count. I mean, what benefit, if any, are they providing to the discussion. The only tweets worth including in comments are usually the comments that were sent to Twitter using Disqus, IntenseDebate or CommenTwitter.

However, there are sites that do provide quality comments worth importing into your posts, like StumbleUpon and Digg. These sites separate the promotion of the content (Digging/linking) from the commentary. ReTweeting is like Digging something. You wouldn’t display each individual Digg on your site below the comments, but you might use the Digg widget to represent the total number of Diggs received and then display any comments about the Digg in the comments of your post. This is how we should handle ReTweets. Use a site like TweetMeme to display your total RT count and then leave the ReTweets out of the comments.

As the filtering and organization of commentary across the web becomes more centralized we will hopefully see great improvements in the way we go about displaying them on our blogs. Until then, let’s just be smart about it.

-Photo by victoriapeckham

I guess my only problem is that, at times, the retweets seem to take over my friend stream. I’m also starting to see a lot of people get lazy with their tweets and retweet other people only to fill up space.

I can’t say I don’t like the idea of retweeting because I do it myself sometimes. I just think we abuse it a bit. This is why I think it would be nice if a mind shift took place where people start sharing information along with their own ideas about it.

This is why I made CommenTwitter. There were plenty of plugins and buttons to help Tweet the title of your post along with a link. In other words, there were plenty of ways to contribute to the noise already building up on Twitter. But why weren’t there any plugins that helped fuel the conversation about your blog outside of their comments. Some of the best ideas and conversations can be found in the comments of a good blog post, so why not bring those discussions to Twitter. This is just one way I think we can bring more value to our tweets when we’re all essentially talking about the same thing.

This is actually something I think Tweetworks does a great job of as well. Rather then take the lazy mans way out and just retweet a good post, you can actually jump into a threaded conversation about that post, ON TWITTER.

So in the end, I won’t be signing any petitions to ask Twitter to add a retweet button to it’s interface. I will also refrain from using retweet buttons when I can. I will however keep mine on my blog because I know it won’t die down any time soon. I will also continue to work on CommenTwitter so that it is more appealing to a larger audience and easier to use.

- Photo by Jon R Bishop

TweetSuite is an excellent plugin developed by ‘social & viral marketing scientist’ Dan Zarrella. It started off as a plugin that returned all ReTweets of a post and has turned into a complete Twitter/Wordpress solution.

Features include:

• Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
• ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
• A digg-like Tweet-This Button
• Automatic Tweeting of new posts
• A Most-Tweeted Widget
• A Recently-Tweeted Widget
• A My-Last-Tweets Widget
• A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

CommenTwitter

I designed CommenTwitter to both increase the quality of tweets about posts as well as generate traffic to that post. I believe people should be just as proud of their comments on other peoples blogs as they are of their own blog posts.

Basically what you do is input your Twitter Credentials before you submit a comment. This in turn tweets an excerpt of your comment along with a link back to the original comment in it’s entirety.

TweetStats

TweetStats is a nifty little plugin that works alongside the TweetBacks plugin. It ultimately allows you to add a widget to the sidebar of your most recent and most popular tweets. I’m hoping this is the beginning of a new generation of plugins working together to present the best content to it’s readers.

Automagic Twitter Profile URI

This is a great plugin that uses a commenters email address to ping the Twitter API and retrieve their Twitter username. It then “automagically” adds the commenters Twitter name next to their name in their comment.

Tweet This

I’m not a huge fan of setting up wordpress to automatically update your Twitter feed every time you post. I think it should be on the publisher to write tweets that are both personal and more attractive to draw in their followers. However I do think it is important to allow other to easily tweet your post.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is another one of those complete WordPress/Twitter solutions.

Features include:

• Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes)
• Create a blog post from each of your tweets
• Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets
• Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
• Post a tweet from your sidebar
• Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens
• Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

Twitter Remote

While not technically a WordPress plugin, I’ve always been a fan of the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget and this would be the Twitter alternative. It basically just display a list of the most recent Tweeps to visit your blog.

I think these plugins best represent the potential when discussing Twitter/Blog integration. It’s time we start working on more practical uses and stop reinventing the wheel. I hope you enjoyed my list and please feel free to add your favorite Twitter/Wordpress plugins in a comment below.

Ultimately I think it would be beneficial if everyone tweeted their blog comments. Currently you’ll see things like:

“Commenting on Jon Bishop’s blog” or “Reading This Awesome New Post”

Every once and awhile someone will actually provide value when Tweeting about one of my posts … but this is rare. I think more people need to start speaking up as it is only through the general consensus of the greater population that we can come to the most logical solution.

So this is where Commentwitter comes in. Ultimately my goal is to give the commenter the option of sending their comment to twitter and allowing people to follow that blogs comments both in the blog and in twitter. The main reason for this is to generate a buzz and encourage commenting on peoples blogs. It will also improve the quality and value of people’s tweets revolving around blog posts.

So here it is, Version 1.0 of Commentwitter.