VentureBeat

You’ve probably noticed that the comments on this site aren’t your typical WordPress-run blog default comments. Instead, they’re run by a third party startup called Disqus. We use this because not only does it offer nice avatars and threaded comments, but also because Disqus is expanding conversations beyond a simple stand-alone comment on one site into truer interaction throughout the web. A new version launching today is a continuation of that trend.

Disqus version 2 eliminates what was the biggest knock on the service: That it took the comments off of your blog and put them on its own site. This was problematic for some site owners because many rightfully wondered what would happen to those comments if their site ever stopped using Disqus. Since they were on Disqus’ servers, they could have been lost forever. More troublesome was that comments using the old Disqus plug-in weren’t able to be crawled by Google bots as they were JavaScript-based. Anyone who cares about search engine optimization (SEO) of their site would not like to hear that.

Disqus had an application programming interface (API) version that solved many of these issues, but its new developer API is much more robust. Comments are now entirely SEO-friendly and there is an automatic data sync between Disqus servers and your site’s local database. This is true for all comments both old and new that were made using Disqus.

But this effort to make the service more portable and open is just one part of the version 2 update. The main thing was to “make everything easier and faster to access,” Disqus co-founder and chief executive Daniel Ha (no relation to VentureBeat writer Anthony Ha) told me.

Along these lines, Disqus’ main site has also gotten a revamped look and feel. The navigation is cleaner and admin capabilities are more logical.

One of the goals of the redesign was to make the site “less like profiles and more like comment blogs,” Ha explained. That is to say, make author pages a more appealing place to go to in order to see what people you are interested in have been saying. After all, comments are content just as much as anything else on the web.

Links on both the site and in alert emails also will now link back to the blog or site itself rather than back to Disqus. Many site owners didn’t like that Disqus was seemingly driving traffic to its own site previously, but Ha told us it was an initial programming oversight and not any kind of traffic scheme.

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JS-Kit, best known for its easy-to-add commenting widget, has acquired Haloscan, another comment service, for an undisclosed mix of cash and stock. The acquisition adds 500,000 blogs to JS-Kit’s reach and makes it larger than the rest of the market, which includes Disqus, SezWho, and Intense Debate, combined.

The company made the acquisition in January and will now begin marketing the rest of its widgets, which include a ratings widget similar to the one below this post, to Haloscan’s existing base. It claims that its widgets, which are used by Sun Microsystems and JetBlue, now have over 19 million users and over 100 million page views a month. It’s not clear, however, how many of these users are active commenters. JS-Kit makes money by placing ads into a stream of comments and shares the revenue 50/50 with the content producer.

In conjunction with this news, JS-Kit has added a “portable profile” feature that strongly resembles the one offered by Disqus. This profile contains all of the posts a commenter has made across any of the sites in JS-Kit’s ecosystem. Despite the fact that this feature is clearly inspired by Disqus (which VentureBeat uses), JS-Kit CEO, Khris Loux, does not hesitate to bash his much-buzzed-about competitor, which he alleges “steals traffic from bloggers” and “is not upfront about its plans to monetize at the expense of its users.”

His critiques focus on the fact that Disqus hosts comments on its own servers and site and in so doing, takes away all the benefits that comments could have on a blog’s search engine ranking. Asked to respond to these criticisms, Disqus founder, Daniel Ha (no relation to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha), points out that his service offers a plug-in that makes it relatively simple to get search engines to index the comments on your blog, itself. Ha also argues that since JS-Kit puts ads in its users’ comments, its monetization plan interferes with the user experience.

See Allen Stern’s post on CenterNetworks for more on the ups and downs of Disqus.

Updated

There’s another company jumping on the video comments bandwagon. Disqus, the startup whose system powers comments for more than 13,000 blogs (including VentureBeat), is adding video through a partnership with Seesmic.

You can see the system at work on Fred Wilson’s blog. There aren’t any particularly fancy or groundbreaking features yet — Disqus’ Daniel Ha (no relation to the writer of this post) says the company wanted to keep things fairly straightforward so it would be “as seamless as possible to go from text to video” and not scare users away.

Fair enough, but do people actually want to leave video comments? TechCrunch has had video comments for a while, but they don’t seem to get much use. Wilson’s firm Union Square Ventures is an investor in Disqus, yet his post — which begins, “First, let me say I am not sure about the utility of video comments” — doesn’t sound completely sold on the idea either.

Ha, however, says that video commenting can take off if it’s marketed to people in the right way, which hasn’t happened yet. This announcement sounds like a small step in a bigger push toward more adoption.

“This new release is admittedly for the early adopter crowd,” Ha says. “We want to get a feel for how they would be using this and their willingness to let go of old standards.”

I’m not convinced yet — it seems like simple text-based comments are just so much easier and more effective. But then, I’m an old-fashioned text guy myself. We’ll keep watching; maybe people will start using the video system for interesting ends.

The new service, which Mashable broke last week, could at least lead to a higher profile for relatively unproven video company Seesmic.

Update: And now you’ll get to see the new feature in action on VentureBeat — we’ve enabled video comments. Have at it!

Disqus, a company that provides a commenting plugin for online publishers, has released a range of new features designed to integrate it more tightly with its partner sites.

When I first covered the San Francisco company last August, I was a little skeptical about its ability to differentiate itself. But it has. I’ve found it to have a more intuitive interface than rivals like SezWho and Intense Debate (our coverage) — it provides very obvious threaded comments, user profiles, and a way of voting on others’ comments.

The biggest change today is that the company is phasing out its forums, which were located on its home site. Instead, it is offering a “community page” on its home site that displays useful additional information about the partner site, such as who the top commenters are, and what the most commented-on stories are.

Disqus has been busy. It has signed up a number of well-known individual bloggers, including the infamous Fake Steve Jobs (the blog’s community page here), Mathew Ingram, Dave Winer, and others. It has also reached into more mainstream audiences, appearing on political sites like PoliticalWire, The Moderate Voice, and even The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s student newspaper.

In total, Disqus’s plugin is on more than 4,000 blogs, it has around 60,000 total commenters and handles an average of around 5,000 comments per day.

The company has also been steadily improving its spam-filtering software. Comment spam from splogs and other jerks on the internet are a big problem, as those who read past VentureBeat articles will see.

For a first-hand account of Disqus in action over the last eight months, read Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson’s post here, on the firm’s official blog. Wilson was one of the first people to try Disqus out, on his personal blog A VC, and he was clearly impressed by what he say.

Disqus has raised half a million from Union Square, angel investor Howard Linzon’s investment company, Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners, and individual angel investors Naval Ravikant and Aydin Senkut (full disclosure: Senkut is also an investor in VentureBeat).

Disqus and Intense Debate are two new blog commenting systems going into public beta today. There are many such services, and none of them have really taken off.

However, these latest companies could help connect conversations in new ways, including by aggregating blog comments on popular social networks that are opening to developers.

Some sites, like coComment, offer features such as forums that are focused around generating a conversation on its own site. Meanwhile, sites like SezWho (we have it in place, below) provide cross-blog commenter profiles.

Both of these new companies take a two-pronged approach. They are both plugins for blog platforms like Blogger or TypePad, and both want to improve the flow of conversation within a blog post’s comment section with comment rankings and threads, and other features, like SezWho. They also both let commenters track their conversations across multiple blogs, like CoComment.

Disqus also offers an API so third parties can access blog comments and include them with other sites. With many social networks already looking to let third parties access their data, perhaps this API could lead to the duplication of comments on blogs and comments on news aggregators like Digg, or on social networks. Users of sites like Myspace or Facebook will discuss blog posts at length, without any of those conversations going back to the blog. For example, on a Facebook post that features a blog post, commenters on that posts aren’t revealed within the original blog’s comments.

So far, we haven’t seen or experienced a clear case of any commenting system producing more traffic for blogs, or more comments. But maybe they could.

After all, bloggers need to recognize a potential return if they are to go through the effort of installing the plugin.

These services also have some other differences. For example, Intense Debate lets you log in via OpenID. Disqus has a central forum so you can see what’s popular on the site. Disqus also comes with a hosted, white-label forum that blogs can introduce, if they want.

Both let you receive updates to threads you’ve commented on via email or RSS, and reply by email to comment again on the past. Disqus shows you the most popular or recent comments from across the blogs you read. CoComment, meanwhile, doesn’t have as advanced of a plugin.

Updated

Disqus is going to launch two features to help blog readers track the most interesting comments on a blog or other web site.

Forum and blogging software has been around for many years, but there’s still no easy way to find the best comments within a web site or from across web sites.

Disqus has a two-part answer to this problem. It provides an advanced commenting system that can be added to a blog article page. Features include nested comments — tiered according to the order in which they were left — and a way for readers to vote for or against comments, and spam protection.

The other feature is a forum hosted separately by Disqus that displays comments from a blog according to how recent the post was published and how “hot” the discussion is on a particular post — in other words, how many comments that post has.

But there are many competitors.

VentureBeat — and other blogs, including Read/WriteWeb — have been testing SezWho (see below), which allows readers to rank each others’ comments, creating a reputation system that users can take with them across blogs. Techcrunch just covered Intense Debate, which provides similar reputation tracking to SezWho. We’ve also written on some of the others, such as CoComment. Public Square provides all-in-one online publishing software that includes a built-in social network for commenters.

Fred Wilson’s “A VC” blog has good examples of both the blog commenting system and the separate forum system for his blog, although the service is not yet publicly available.

Disqus is part of Big Head Labs and has received funding from Y Combinator.