Disqus, a Y Combinator startup, is a comment system that enables site publishers/bloggers and commenters to gain more control over their commenting activities. As you can see in the video, Disqus offers a lot of functionality around comments: Customize the look of the comment box, Seesmic‘s video comment, trackbacks, comment moderation, widgets, and so much more.
A lot of bloggers are really enthusiast about their Disqus comment system: Fred Wilson early-adopted the service and liked it so much he invested in Disqus. Seesmic Founder Loic LeMeur chose Disqus as the first remote comment system to integrate Seesmic‘s video comments. When Friendfeed came clashing the market with its promise of syndicating the whole Web discussion on its boat, Disqus created a bridge with the ex-Googler startup to expand the reach of Disqus’ comments. Disqus has developed in such a way that it became the best fit comment system to adapt to the evolution of the social media.
As usual, the buzz comes with a bug. Some voices arose on the Web pointing out to the fact that Disqus “steals” traffic from blogs, because their email alerts send recipients to the Disqus threaded comments interface, instead of linking back to the original post. After acquiring Haloscan a few days back, JS-Kit added a portable profile feature to their own commenting system and CEO Khris Loux made a direct attack against Disqus’ ways:
Despite the fact that this feature is clearly inspired by Disqus, 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.
It doesn’t sound very thoughtful to aggress Silicon Valley’s favorite commenting system heads on. Plus you could argue that re-directing email alerts’ traffic to the Disqus platform is actually more convenient, as you can participate to the discussion of several blogs from there.
Disqus is a very reliable commenting system. I’ve been a user since mid-November 2007: It never crashed, never lost a comment of mine, never did weird stuff or got hacked by spamming bots. It’s a very reliable system. For those worried about what Disqus could end up doing to monetize comments, from what I know of Disqus’ CEO, he is very ethical and trustworthy.