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Product Blog

  1. gjcourt

    Pull people into your conversation with @mentions

    Posted on May 6 by gjcourt

    I’m excited to introduce a new feature we’ve just rolled out called Disqus @mentions. @mentions allows you to pull people into new conversations by mentioning them in your comments.
     
    Before @mentions, commenting threads were an island. There wasn’t a way to reach out to people who weren’t already participating. Now with @mentions, you can call out your friends or friendly social media gurus, and get them involved in the conversation.

    To begin using @mentions, just type the @ symbol and then continue typing the name of the person you’d like to mention. As you type you will see a drop down list of suggested users to choose from. The drop down is smart; it will update with increasingly accurate suggestions the further you type.

    Notice that there are two groups of suggested users, labeled “in this conversation” and “elsewhere”. The in this conversation category represents users that exist in the current thread. Users in the elsewhere category are folks who are not in the current thread.

    We support mentioning Disqus and Twitter usernames in the elsewhere category. This is a way to mention people directly on Disqus or Twitter when they don’t exist in the current conversation. Disqus users will receive an email notifying them of their mention, while Twitter users will get a friendly @mention from our spiffy Twitter bot.

    If you have NADD like me, you’ve stopped reading this long ago and tried to mention all of your friends :-) Let us know what you think, feedback is always appreciated. Happy mentioning.

  2. danielha

    The Numbers of Disqus

    Posted on May 4 by danielha

    This post is about the latest going-ons with Disqus. A lot has been happening over here, and they all can be somewhat represented with numbers. So, this post is also about the numbers of Disqus.

    Four

    Four years ago this week, Disqus became a company. We started Disqus because we thought that the concept would be fun to work on. The web is such a wonderful place: we worked on Disqus just because we wanted it to exist. We didn’t even know if anyone else would care.

    Five hundred million

    Fortunately for us, we discovered that a number of people did care. And today, we’re ecstatic about how high this number has grown. The Disqus network of communities reaches nearly 500 million unique visitors every month. This is across the 750,000 websites using Disqus, with about 35 million users participating on these communities.

    Ten million

    Startups are all about paying attention to the key numbers, and these numbers keep us going strong. So with that, we’re excited to be announcing the newest number that’s important to us: we’ve just closed a $10 million round with North Bridge and Union Square Ventures. I’m happy to welcome Ric Fulop, our newest investor partner (and repeat entrepreneur), to the team.

    Five hundred

    With this latest financing, we will be expanding the team, our products, and on building our long-term business. In the last 12 months, Disqus grew at least 500% across all of our core metrics: traffic, users, and communities. In fact, just this past November we announced hitting 200 million uniques/month and we’re now already approaching 500M! We’ve taken our time to carefully build the foundations of our core platform, and it’s allowed us to handle — admittedly with plenty of challenges — the accelerating growth with a small team.

    Seventy five

    According to a recent study by Lijit, Disqus is used by 75% of websites who use a third party commenting or discussion system. We’re happy to be able to work with some of the top publishers and media properties on the web. Some of our most recent partners include BarackObama.com, Time Magazine, IGN, NASDAQ, PCMag, ReadWriteWeb, and Wired Magazine. Disqus’ business is in our VIP service and the recently launched Add-ons. As we grow the business of Disqus, we’re paying a lot of attention to how audience engagement transforms how people appreciate online content. We hope to establish a strong business in helping websites recognize and build on this value.

    Two

    We’re building Disqus for two types of users: a) the publishers who use the Disqus platform, and b) regular web users who encounter Disqus on the web. We’re on the verge of releasing some cool, new features for the platform. And we’re just getting started there. We’re also looking forward to spending more time on new ways to make Disqus fun and enjoyable to use for the rest of us web users.

    Sixteen

    The Disqus team is made up of 16 wonderful people, and we’re hoping to grow that number to follow the growth of our network. Keep an eye on our jobs page for the positions we’re opening up.

    We receive lots of feedback and feature suggestions and, while we can’t implement them all, many of our releases have been inspired by the activity we’ve observed. If you use Disqus, either as a blogger or a commenter, please let us know what you’d like to see from us.

  3. giannii

    Mixing it up at MIX11

    Posted on April 12 by giannii

    Today Microsoft will be holding its sixth annual MIX event in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you’re unfamiliar with MIX11, it’s a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts, and business professionals creating innovative sites on the web.

    This year MIX will be releasing a new version of Orchard, a free content management system. This version is packed with features such as a simplified setup, configuration, better theming, better deployment tools, and community discussion powered by Disqus.

    Orchard is available for free download from the Microsoft Web Application Gallery, and also from the Orchard Project.

    Be sure to check out the live stream here: live.visitmix.com.

  4. antonkovalyov

    New integration with Google accounts

    Posted on March 23 by antonkovalyov

    We like to think of Disqus as a bridge that connects your website’s community with the awesome, hectic activity that happens in other places of the web. That’s why we focus on great integration with the social networks people love, such as Twitter and Facebook.
     
    Nearly 13% of users choose to login through Twitter or Facebook when participating in Disqus communities. Today, we’re happy to introduce another recognizable choice: Google accounts. Millions upon millions of people are already logged into their Google accounts, and now they can easily use those accounts to jump into discussions all over the web.
    Google Sign-In

    We use Google’s OpenID + OAuth support to securely authenticate users without sharing any passwords. If you already have a Disqus profile, you can also connect your Google account in order to link to your Google page and use your picture. Enjoy!

  5. dcramer

    Scaling Disqus at PyCon 2011

    Posted on March 15 by dcramer

    Last weekend, several engineers at Disqus attended PyCon 2011 in Atlanta, GA. Jason Yan and myself gave a keynote on Sunday morning describing our development philosophy, infrastructure, and why we continue to use Python. You can watch the video below (or on blip.tv if you prefer), and the slides are available on SlideShare.