To bring up someone’s mini profile, you can hover your mouse cursor over his/her picture or name. The mini profiles were relatively incomplete when we released it, only serving to show other profiles and services that a commenter used or had on the web.

Our latest update adds a couple things that, together, should increase the mini profile’s usefulness factor by at least 68% (rough estimate). Bring up someone’s mini profile to view the last few things they’ve said across blogs using Disqus. If he added Twitter to his Disqus profile, you can view his current status as well.

I just wanted to quickly point out that we added support for gravatars earlier this week. Gravatars are popular universal avatars. If you haven’t uploaded a picture on Disqus, we’ll display your gravatar (if you have one) instead.

“…but not when you’re having it.”

We were offered this advice by many different people when discussing the scaling issues we may run into when creating such a distributed web application.

The idea is that it would be a good problem because it would surely indicate that we were popular, thriving, and thus successful. But it isn’t a good problem for all of you that are users of Disqus. It isn’t a good problem for us at Disqus, as we’re building our service based on trust, performance, and reliability.

We had some downtime this morning, starting at 7am PST, for a little under 30 minutes.
We are sorry. I am personally sorry. Being a popular service is not a valid excuse for being unavailable when other websites depend on you.

So, what are we doing about it? Lots. We have spent a lot of time recently optimizing and tweaking. Disqus is in transition-mode to upgrading our web and database servers (plus a few other misc. infrastructure points).

Bonus apology: This week, email us with the subject “Downtime makes me sad” and we’ll send over some cool Disqus swag. Be sure to indicate your blog/website and share a sentence or two about your experiences with Disqus.

Thanks all — it’s not a good problem to have and we’ll do our best to make sure it doesn’t become a problem you have to deal with.

We’re very excited to announce our integration with Plaxo, a step in the right direction regarding the defragmentation of comments and web discussion. But, first, some background:

A little over a week ago, there was some chatter about how conversations were getting split across the original blog article and feed/aggregator type services.

Some felt that bloggers should take issue with the fact that their article’s discussion is happening somewhere else. This is a valid concern. If I took the time and energy to write a carefully crafted post, I’d like the discussion to be accessible on the blog. However, the discussion that happens on sites like reddit or digg is important. It exposes the article or content to a wider audience that might not otherwise participate in the comments. The problem, then, is that the comments are now fragmented.

One of our goals here at Disqus is to defragment discussions. Because Disqus is a intermediary service that works with bloggers and commenters, we can act as a bridge.

Plaxo Pulse is a very cool service that allows you to stay connected with your friends’ activities on the web, including blog posts. If your blog uses Disqus (why wouldn’t it?), you can now sync that up with Plaxo. Then, whenever someone makes a comment on Plaxo in response to your blog post, it’ll get posted right back to your blog through Disqus.

Check out Plaxo’s blog post about this new integration.

This is partly made possible through our API write method which, while not public in the docs yet, is just about ready for mass consumption. If your service is interested in connecting conversations, let us know at all@disqus.com.

UPDATE: John McCrea has a great blog post up about this, appropriately titled Who Owns This Conversation, Part Two. It’s the continuation of an ongoing discussion, but it’s now heading in the right direction.

There were a couple small things added for blog admins (moderators) this week.

• Under the Access & Moderators tab, you are now able to set words that you don’t want posted on your blog. Comments containing any of those words will be put in moderation for your approval (or, more likely, disapproval).
• Take a look under the Configure tab. There’s a new option that enables you to set the max thread depth for replies. If you have a narrow page design, a busy conversation with multiple replies may not work too well. You can force the replies to stop threading after 1, 2, or any number of posts.

Have a great weekend, folks! See you at Startup School if you’ll be there.

ReadBurner relaunched today with a number of cool new things including integration with Google Reader and Disqus.

You can catch the details on SheGeeks and ReadWriteWeb.

At Disqus, we’re working to smooth out the Disqus integration so that conversations are not fragmented between websites and services. Soon comment threads on ReadBurner will tie in with the comment threads on the blog itself.

Another great RSS aggregator is RSSmeme which also uses Disqus for its comment system. Check out both and let them know what you think.

The first batch of Disqus t-shirts arrived today. We’re not sure what we’re doing with these things just yet, but for now there is one guaranteed way of obtaining one:

• You are going to be at Startup School this weekend (at Stanford in Palo Alto) and
• You would like to help represent Team Disqus by wearing the shirt all day

Sound good? Let me know.

As a follow-up to Monday’s dashboard upgrade, we have released the ability to Lock threads.

What is locking a thread?

Locking a thread closes comments on a particular topic. It stops people from participating further in the discussion.

Why would I want to lock a thread?

You tell me. Perhaps you don’t want people to discuss a certain post or page. Maybe the discussion has run its due course. It’s up to you, buddy.

Ok, how do I do it?

In the upper right side of your dashboard, toggle “Manage: Threads.” You’ll see the lock option, which looks like this:

Silly title, yes, but read on.

If you use Plaxo Pulse, you can now share your Disqus comments to all of your contacts. Simple enough, right? Beautiful in its simplicity, I say.

Get to it.

Also, yesterday we threw up a “Help Wanted - Inquire Within” sort of sign up on Hacker News. We’re growing the team and looking for…

• Python + Django hacker
• Experience with PostgreSQL
• Very comfortable with JavaScript
• Scaling a distributed web application
• Uncovering relevance from large data sets
• Play a significant role in product and market direction
• Love blogs and online communities

Does this sound like you? Let us know at jobs [at] disqus [dot] com

You can now edit your comments inline on Disqus. Now you can freely edit those typos, bad links, and regretful name-calling before anyone really notices. Keep in mind that you will only be able to edit comments which haven’t received a reply yet. Otherwise, can you imagine the mess?

Fairly straightforward. Have fun.