Disqus, whose widely used commenting engine adds audience/community engagement for zillions of websites, has joined Zeta Global, a large Marketing firm, while promising to keep offering the features that made Disqus so useful. Color me doubtful - while a positive outcome sometimes results from such a merger, often the oomph of the original service is lost once the new masters are in control. They are saying the right things and promising to stay true to the Vision for Disqus. We'll have to wait and see, and in the meantime it may be worth our while to locate other commenting systems. As the recently posted Disqus Roadmap so clearly says, a website publisher is in their best position when they own their platform. The risk of Disqus joining a larger company is erosion of that situation.