The blog commenting system Disqus picked up $500,000 in a series A by Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson), Naval Ravikant, Howard Lindzon, Aydin Senkut. Union Square’s investment isn’t all too surprising considering how Fred Wilson has raved about the service. Including Wilson’s own blog, Disqus is currently used on over 4,000 blogs with nearly 60,000 commenters.
The service brings enhancements to blog comments that are not standard features in most blog installations, such as threading, spam filtering, comment/user ratings, and user identities. They’ve also integrated OpenID support through ClickPass. Disqus launched with a host of other commenting services around October of last year. IntenseDebate is a close competitor from a competing incubator, TechStars, as well. SezWho, and CoComment also provide some of the same support.
The overall trajectory of the Disqus and other commenting systems is toward building communities around blogs, similar to MyBlogLog (sold to Yahoo). The idea is to serve as an aggregation point for conversations across multiple blogs so avid commenters can more easily track what’s being talked about. They also want incorporate other feeds such as Facebook and Twitter into user’s profiles. While larger blogs might not like the idea of providing content for another destination site, co-founder Daniel Ha says that the service has already taken hold in verticals such as politics and finance.
Awesome! Congrats…
Congrats to Daniel and his team! Disqus’ Beta2 Is Rockin’!
the first disqus hyperlink is broken. http://dsqus.com instead of http://disqus.com
Note: The first link to the disqus site is leading nowhere…
Cool, stuff! I just checked if they also registered Disq.US and damn they did
Thanks Nick, for putting SezWho in a different bucket than Disqus…We are not really a comment replacement system…Rather we just provide the context, ratings and reputation service that enables sites to keep their data and all the benefits (like Google PageRank etc., support for trackbacks, other comment widgets etc.) associated with it.
I think these services are great and deeply improve the usability of commenting systems.
However, there’s a negative in Discus and some other commenting services to blog owners in that your comments are hosted on another site and displayed by an iFrame or injected via JS after page load. If you look at the source HTML of a blog permalink page, you don’t see the comments. For sites with any real comment activity, those comments are fertile ground for search engine bots. Taking out the comments can only hurt your page rank.
As a user, I’m not so sure that I want a third-party site tracking my comments across numerous sites. It doesn’t really add any value from my perspective. It’s invasive, giving other ppl too much private info about my activity online.
Congrats on the venture capital — I can see a universalized means of communication emerging for blogging as well as social networking. I’m waiting to see when you have one ID you may use everywhere, much like the OpenID idea.
Jonathan,
Good point…which is why we only work on public sites and make our SezWho profiles completely customizable by the users.
Thanks, Jitendra
Just to inform you, the Disqus link in the post is broken.
It’ll be interesting to see how Disqus and IntenseDebate enhance my blogging experience. I’ve gotta say I haven’t been too impressed with IntenseDebate. I was on ‘Ask The VC’ and had a super hard time signing in a few weeks ago. I don’t know if it has to do with the OpenID thing, but when I tried creating an account it took forever.
Anyway, it may just be a simple ‘ID10T’ error on my part. Let’ see what these services do for my blogging experience.
Raza Imam
http://SoftwareSweatshop.com
Congrats to the Disqus Team!!! You guyz rock!
Great news! Congrats to the team. I’m a Disqus user and very happy with the service.
@ Jonathan > For me the big value add IS the fact that it’s 3rd party. It means I never have to upgrade my blog software, and they do all the hard work. This week was a great example - they rolled out a bunch of new features and it was all just magically available one day. A far cry from when I used to use Wordpress (or other blogging engine) and taking advantage of any new features would mean having to download the new version of the app, uploading files and most likely troubleshooting my way through some tedious upgrade process.
The other killer feature for me - and I’m sure there are many users on Techcrunch for whom this is a potential life-changer - is that when I get an email notification of a new comment on my blog, I can reply to the comment simply by replying to the email, and it gets magically posted to my blog. I laugh at the old way this used to get done - you’d click a link, go to your blog page, fill in a form; seems so archaic now. This convenience alone, especially if you run a blog with high comment traffic or a high level of need for replies (e.g. you write software and support it via your blog), makes Disqus an awesome addition to your blog and will save you heaps of time.
Well done Daniel and Disqus!
Good to see that there’s a value in these services. Do folks see value in the profile-y features of dsqus, cocomment, intensedebate? Personally I saw these features as a barrier to entry. Everyone already has too many profiles on sites, why bother with another? Js-kit’s lightweight service seems worth mentioning in this crowd.
@Jonathan & @yongfook > I’m in the same boat as you. js-kit.com has kind of figured this out by making a rss feed of comments available that can be spidered as if it’s your site.
I love Disqus, use it on my blog, great service, congrats guys!
Jamie
Not sure what the fuss is about, but the features on offer at these providers can be quite easily replicated with existing Wordpress plugins.
I implemented a number scoring review and user comments rating system in about 15 minutes using freely available WP plugins, see it in action at Jakarta Bar.com
Would concede that its not as sexy but it does its job, was relatively easy for a novice Wordpress user to implement, and certainly did not need millions of dollars of funding for the plugin writers to develop.
And by the way, Jakarta Bar.com’s review and comments rating system also works very well on the iPhone.
Not dedicated URL for this, you’ll need to access the site on the iPhone to see it in action.
Disqus is quite popular on the Tumblr platform, which actually doesn’t have a commenting system of its own. It works perfectly on there, and integration is a snap.
I also love already being logged in when I visit a blog using Disqus, and being able to track my comments on various blogs, including my own, from a single location.
Lastly, the Disqus.com homepage, which features popular threads, is a great place to “get into the conversation”.
Congratulations to Disqus and their new investors!
My take at
http://www.sezwho.com/blog/200.....s-a-round/