Blog comments using Twitter

Tumblr doesn’t have a comments function (although it does have Answers). Why should it? it’s a tumblelog; a form micro-blogging. Lengthy discussion sections on the page are not really suited to the concept. But at the same time, people like to comment and discuss – to engage in the conversation.

In recent times we’ve seen a shift of comments away from the blog sites themselves and over to social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Today I was inspired by Faruk Ateş’s blog post The killing of the comments to add the possibility to my Tumblr site for readers to leave and read comments using Twitter. Afterall, the conversation (should there by any) is already there so why re-invent the wheel when it’s already been re-invented?

Update: 2010-01-07

After Twitter reduced the availability of tweets via search.twitter.com to 7 days, the Twitter comment feature describe above became less useful. I’ve now switched to using Typepad Connect integrated with Tumblr.