Disqus Releases ‘Likes’

This morning I noticed this on my site:

From the Disqus blog:

(Re)Introducing Community Likes

This feature continues Disqus’ goal to help pull a true community out of the audience that visits your site. Liking comments has been a core piece of Disqus since the beginning, and we’re now extending this feedback mechanism to the top-level page or article itself. Community Likes is an easy, quick way for your visitors to give feedback and make their presence known on your site, all without having to post an actual comment.

Community Likes also functions as a slick way for people to share the article on Facebook and Twitter (only if they give it a thumbs up — but don’t worry, we’ve been seeing over 90% likes over dislikes). That means that liking content with Disqus’ buttons taps into the power of both Facebook’s and Twitter’s social networks.

Hmmm. Aside from the fact that I think blogs and websites can have ‘true community’ without Disqus comments, I like the idea of what they are up to, especially for blogs and websites that are a bit short on social gestures.

But for me, and others that are using Tumblr and other platforms that already have a ‘likes’ capability, we are going to have a clash of social engagement. Should a visitor to this post use the Tumblr ‘like’ or the Disqus ‘like’? Or both? Is there some way for a blog publisher to collate these together?

This is perhaps (yet another) situation where you have wonder Tumblr doesn’t implement its own integrated commenting solution. It is inviting this sort of confusion, or worse, watching the rich social integration of Tumblr getting diluted by third party commenting plug-ins, like Disqus or JS-Kit.

I am going to watch and see what happens, but I am sure confusion is going to ensue. Disqus offers publishers the means to disable these features, which is my first instinct, I confess.

What do you think? Which would you use?