I’m happy to announce that the first official release of our public API is now online. The methods provided are enough to let you write your own comment import tools, export tools, or even a custom Disqus plugin for your platform. Much thanks goes to our early adopters for helping us polish the documentation and identify the missing methods. With their help, the API has been steadily improving since the release of our Wordpress plugin.

We’re excited to see what people come up with. And of course, the Disqus API is still improving frequently, so let us know what could be better.

When Disqus was started, the discussion in the blog comments was still a neglected part of publishing. Today, with the availability of Disqus and other comment-focused services, people are paying attention to what once was a thoroughly lackluster experience for both publishers and readers.

The Disqus team just came back from this past weekend’s Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas. We spoke to hundreds of bloggers and publishers who were excited about what we were doing, as well as met many existing Disqus fans. How people perceive the importance of blog discussion is changing quickly. When we first started Disqus, it was difficult to communicate to people how this service works — this was because there was nothing quite like it before. Now, we can see that the Disqus just makes sense to people when we talk about it to them.

Today, Automattic (the team behind the WordPress platform) announced their acquisition of IntenseDebate, a competing and similarly-focused comment service. From all of us at Disqus: congrats to the ID team on joining the Automattic family. We’re fans of WordPress here (this blog uses it), so I think it’s good that they’re beginning to pay more attention to the comments.

So what does this mean for us? The Disqus comment system is still the largest third-party comment system on WordPress, yet those blogs represent under 5% of all websites using Disqus. We pride ourselves on being an independent cross-platform service. Disqus will continue to innovate and provide the best discussion experience on blogs. Our company’s entire focus is on increasing the number and quality of your comments and that will never change.

As a true third-party system, Disqus can be open and extensible to other services and platforms, as well as offer unique functionality not limited by a single platform. I’m looking forward to the future of discussion and I hope you’ll experience it with Disqus.

Going from a single database to a multi-server setup is a big step in scaling any website. We’re happy to report that we successfully completed the transition earlier today. Although there was a period of decreased performance, things are now running better than ever and the benefits should remain visible across all sites using Disqus comments.

We had been considering this move for a while. Then at DjangoCon, we learned that our framework of choice had improved to the point where it was actually pretty easy. Knowledge isn’t all we acquired at DjangoCon: we also got Malcolm Tredinnick, a core Django developer, working with us for one intensive week to improve our database code even further. So thanks Malcolm, thanks Django, and sorry to anyone who was affected this morning.

Two things:

1) Disqus will be at Blog World Expo next weekend, September 19th through the 21st. If you, fellow blog friends, will be there then come find us and obtain your own Disqus t-shirt. If you have a support request, we’ll also help you fix it on the spot.

2) We are seeking the right people to join our team. Currently open positions include: Back-end engineer, Front-end engineer, Community support, and a software developer intern. All the details are located on our jobs page.

And now, I leave you with a few pictures that were tagged “disqus” on Flickr.