Hot on the heels of BlogWorldExpo in New York, I’m already back in Montgomery, AL visiting my wife’s family and making changes to my blog.  I’ve been installing and testing quite a few new plugins, and I want to talk about each of them more in depth.  The biggest change I’ve made, however, was switching from my long-time favorite Disqus to the Livefyre commenting system.

Let me start by saying that I love the built in WordPress comments.  They lack, however, on the social side; the marketer side of me has to have more than just the ability to enter a name and email address.  So, I install other systems like IntenseDebate or Disqus.  The one thing I didn’t like about them, however, was that they had their own comment moderation panels; basically you had two comment moderation sections.  But not with Livefyre.

Livefyre works with the built in comment moderation system, so you can keep moderating comments on the back-end system just like you normally would.  The real fun stuff, however, happens on the front side.

I made a few of my favorite points known above.

From the top, the dark blue box show’s who is paying attention to the conversation.  You can quickly hover over users and see (if they have profiles set up) their profile page with latest comments and continue to dive into the conversation.

The pink shows the social sharing aspects – you can post comments to Facebook or Twitter seamlessly, and setup is just as quick as entering in credentials and authorizing once.

The red is my personal favorite.  Once you’ve added in your credentials as stated above, you can hit the @ key and immediately start bringing in references to Facebook or Twitter friends. It allows you to also point to livefyre users, but once you’ve made the reference it automatically links to their profile on that specific service.

The yellow, while not shown above, occurs if you hover over a comment.  You get a typical share and “flag” (report) box, but the flagging has a bit of a twist thrown in. You get your standard reasons to report, but you can also flag a comment as “Disagree” or “Off-topic”.  This shows the comment moderators discussions taking place where hot-spots in the conversation might occur (or arguments) so you can jump in and curate as needed.

I encourage you to give Livefyre a shot – it’s integrated seamlessly with both a light colored and dark colored WordPress theme, and they’re super active in resolving issues and adding features.  You can download their plugin straight from the plugin repository, or by visiting their main website.