Looking to the Future of Discussion

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.

Daniel on September 23rd 2008 in disqus

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