Tweetbacks and More From Disqus

This is an infomercial for our portfolio company Disqus. And I am proud to say that because Disqus is hands down the best comment system on the web and its getting better every day.

Disqus has some great new features and they've rolled them out first on Mashable, a leading tech blog that now uses the Disqus comment system. The new features include:

1) tweetbacks – when the post is discussed on Twitter, those tweets will be brought back to the comment thread
2) diggbacks – when the post is discussed on Digg, those comments will be brought back to the comment thread

When combined with Disqus' existing support of FriendFeed comments, this provides the triple play of social media. The blogger gets to see all of the discussion in one place and so does the reader. This is a big deal to me and I bet to many other bloggers.

3) Retweet the comment. There is now a checkbox in the disqus comment field to retweet the comment you are leaving. This may be an even bigger deal because so many amazing comments are stuck behind the comment link. Now you, the commenter, can tell the world about your amazing comment and get the traffic to it you deserve.

Disqus partnered with a company called UberVU to deliver these features. Disqus posted about this news and so did Mashable. You can see the new features in action on that Mashable post. I hope they will be available here on this blog shortly.

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Comments (Archived):

  1. vanelsas

    Now all Disqus needs to do is get rid of those annoying popups in the commenting section. I just mentioned that on FF (before you posted this) http://friendfeed.com/e/c31… 😉

    1. fredwilson

      I’m not familiar with the popups. When do they happen to you?

      1. vanelsas

        hover over your name in the comments. They pop up then (and interrupt the flow while reading)

        1. vanelsas

          wondering now if that would be a setting on my side, but I can;t find it. Anyone else see them too?

        2. fredwilson

          Aha. I like that feature but I will share your thoughts with the team. There may be a less intrusive way to do it

          1. rikin

            I actually enjoy this feature because if I like your comment on a post I might like your comments on other posts and therefore other blogs. It’s a great method to find some good blogs.However, I can see some people getting pissed off by this feature (similar to Snap) so including an opt out/block option is probably the best way to appease lovers and haters.

          2. Mark Kachigian

            I agree that it is quite intrusive and reminds me of using Snap. Besides this, the discuss system IS hands down the best comments system out there. I personally detest pop ups — especially ones that are prompted by a rollover and not a click.

          3. JLM

            I like the feature.

          4. mydigitalself

            It annoyed me too. My suggestion would be to not have a separate close action for it, so if I rollover your name, the popup appears and i roll out of it, the popup should close automatically too.

          5. kidmercury

            yeah, the separate close action is what really hurts. though i’d much prefer to see publishers given control over these types of issues and most issues in general.

          6. daryn

            The feature is great for exploring commenters.The biggest problem usability-wise is that when you’re scrolling through comments, you most likely have your cursor in the middle of the window somewhere, and it is going to accidentally land on a person’s name and launch the popup while you’re trying to read their comment.The quick fix is to have it go away when you move your cursor off of it, rather than having to explicitly click the close button.

          7. vanelsas

            that would definitely help. I would still prefer to be able to turn that feature on or off myself. But having it disappear would already solve half the issue

          8. Cliff

            Or, have a separate icon next to the poster’s name that must be clicked on to activate the comment history popup. The click action is a small effort for those wanting to see the history, yet avoids the rather annoying accidental popup case.

          9. Banet

            The pop-ups very likely annoy more people than they please. The right solution would be a simple link to the right of your name (there’s tons and tons of room) that reads “more” or some such. Clicking it would call up the exact same popup.Really, the hardest part would be finding just the right language for the link.

        3. IsaacF

          vanelsas, that bugs me too. Wish they’d disappear onmouseout.

    2. EmailBusiness

      Hey Vanelsas,I Love those Popups!It gives me a chance to see what other people on DISQUS are all about.And it’s nothing like SNAP….Snap is intrusive advertising.The DISQUS profile is an interesting and necessary part of the Disqus social media.

  2. ickledot

    Sounds excellent. Well done to all. Disqus is wonderful.

  3. guinness416

    I also detest the popups, FWIW.

    1. fredwilson

      This is great feedback guys. Thanks so much!!!

      1. brooksjordan

        I think the popups have value, but they do get in the way if all you want to do is click through to the person’s blog or website.

  4. abrudtkuhl

    I don’t really mind the popups.. It gives you insight into the commentor..Other than that – Disqus rocks. I finally took the plunge

  5. Olle Ahnve

    What are your thoughts about the risk of the comments section being cluttered from too many sources – regular comments, tweets, diggs, etc. I’d say there could soon be a great need to visualize comments in a different way than merely threaded.

    1. fredwilson

      That may well be true and this will be both a challenge and an opportunityfor disqus and its competitors

      1. Cliff

        Agreed – there is an enormous amount of value to extract from secondary blog content but dumping this all into a single unfiltered stream can dilute the cream (and even lead to performance issues like what hymanroth reports below from overseas, and which I experience from NYC as well.)Aside from options to organize/sort/filter comments directly on the posting page, I personally would appreciate a popup window that gave a global and interactive view of all resources associated with the post. Resources include direct comments, commenters, trackbacks/pingbacks, indirect comments (i.e. diggbacks, tweetbacks, friendfeed comments, etc.), “more like this” links (a la Zemanta), links embedded within any of the above (and/or within the post), etc.The popup could initially present a dashboard style summary of these resources, with various sections:- stats area shows # comments, # commenters, etc. by source – a social news section lists the posts from sources such as digg, mixx, etc., and indicates the rating and # comments for each such post- one section could just be a digest of all relevant links (i.e. embedded in posts/comments, trackbacks/pingbacks, more like this, etc.)- …But then it would also be possible to drilldown, sort and filter in various ways. So you could see comments, for example, sorted/filtered by the following attributes:- commenter (including special cases of my comments, replies to my comments, poster’s comments)- source of comment (i.e. directly on this site, via digg, via twitter, etc.) – comment rating- commenter rating- …I imagine there would be issues associated with filtering comments based on an overall commenter rating, but I’d certainly be a user of that feature and would want that right on the main posting page.(BTW, are spell check and “save draft” functions available for the long worded commenters among us?)

      2. kidmercury

        i hope disqus responds by giving bloggers/publishers who install disqus greater control over all these features — i.e. yes/no for popups, which data sources are integrated, etc. deep integration with content management systems will yield maximum value for all parties IMO

        1. fredwilson

          Me too and I know daniel is reading all of these comments and listening to the feedback

          1. kidmercury

            of course you would, you’re a blog star. you know sometimes i think the whole USV portfolio is just a conspiracy to help you increase the value of your blog. i’m on to you boss!i gotta admit i didnt get disqus at first. i thought you had upped your intake of fox news or something when you announced this investment. now i see the OMG potential of it though. i hope they can pull all this integration stuff off, it will be epic if so.

          2. fredwilson

            You’ve been on to me for quite a while kid

  6. kidmercury

    if disqus could make an add-on for vbulletin, i think that would be great for getting disqus into the forum space, which i think would be great for forum owners and disqus.

    1. Yule Heibel

      *That* is an awesome suggestion… Don’t know if you’re familiar with SkyscraperPage (http://skyscraperpage.com/), which has an incredible forum (http://forum.skyscraperpage… that covers – literally – the globe, with commentary on every city and every urban issue and every damn building of note. And within SkyscraperPage forums, there are spin-offs for individual (specialized) city forums (for example, VibrantVictoria – http://www.vibrantvictoria…..The amount information and conversation and data in these threads is enormous. But it’s all locked into the vBulletin format, with no RSS or any of that other fancy 2.0 stuff… :(If Disqus could work with vBulletin, that would be interesting.By the way (I *have* to put this local plug in!): SkyscraperPage was founded by Dylan Leblanc, right here in Victoria, BC, when he was 18 years old. A couple of years ago, Dylan agreed to partner with Mike Kozakowski (also from Victoria), and together they run SkyscraperPage out of their Yates Street/ Millie’s Lane office.Just the other day I was telling them about outside.in, and about how it would be interesting if there were some synergy between outside.in’s capture of local information and the capture of local information that goes on in all of SkyscraperPage’s city compilations. Take a look, for example, at the “NYC Compilation of Projects of 12 Floors and Over” (http://forum.skyscraperpage… or any of the other city-specific threads, or the regional sections (eg., my region, British Columbia: http://forum.skyscraperpage….Tons of information, but without the webbiness of something like Disqus…But tons of LOVE – people commit to producing content and value for this forum (by moderating, producing architectural diagrams, researching archival/ historical information, etc.) because they’re passionate about built form and about *their* locale. And they have soooo much knowledge about both.(Full disclosure: I <3 SSP and VV and all that user-generated content! 🙂 )

      1. kidmercury

        yes i have been hoping for an outside.in extension for vbulletin as well. both outside.in and disqus have APIs so if those companies don’t proactively pursue integration with vbulletin i’m sure vbulletin developers will. i plan on investing in such functionality at some point if no one does it before me. though i am a cheapskate so i’d much rather someone else foot the bill :)vbulletin can import RSS feeds, which is something you may find interesting for your friend’s site if they are not doing so already. though i noticed your friend is using vbulletin 3.6.4, IMO they would benefit from upgrading to latest version (3.8.1) to get most out of RSS importing, if they want to do that.

  7. rikin

    These features are amazing and I agree Disqus is by far the best commenting system. Even their sidebar widgets are great (why aren’t you using them?!).I can see this being a big boost to smaller/newer blogs that often struggle to break through comment inertia but are often discussed across other mediums. What about facebook comments for articles?- considering connect is already in place I imagine it can’t be too difficult.

  8. David Semeria

    I’m not in the States, so this comment may not be too useful, but there is a pretty big lag between the main post loading and all the comments coming up.I would say the average lag is about 20-30 seconds (for avc.com)

    1. fredwilson

      Thanks for that feedback. We’ll need to address that

  9. Colin N.

    We implemented disqus on the thrive blog. Aside from a bug that briefly changed disqus into spanish, It has been great. Tweetbacks and diggbacks are a great way to incentivize users to comment on the article rather than commenting about the article.

    1. Vladimir Oane

      Most part of the social media comments is done through uberVU API. Disqus have been great to work with on the integration btw. But expect on great new things in the future from both us (uberVU) and DISQUS.

  10. D. Lambert

    Very cool. I switched my blog to Disqus a few months ago, and I like it a lot. The product keeps getting better, and more people are jumping on the bandwagon. Keep up the good work!

  11. mydigitalself

    I like Disqus. Funnily enough about a year ago I sent an email around to a few friends of mine proposing to build something similar. One of the features I proposed and that I think would still be very interesting is on Disqus.com having a Hot Topics section where blogs that are receiving a lot of comments get bubbled up. You can imagine that these topics become more relevant to me, so if I’m posting heavily on tech blogs then the hot tech posts get bubbled up there etc…Basically a mashup of Technorati + Disqus, I’m sure you can throw Twitter & Tumblr into such a mash up. So then have a real dashboard of Conversations that are popular and engaging.

    1. maxkalehoff

      Disqus is good. I like the pop-ups, but I shouldn’t have to close them after I’m done scrolling over them. And some of them are a bit big and intrusive.Importantly, Disqus made a critical upgrade recently: enabling no-follow for comments when the WordPress plugin is used.

  12. JoelH

    Disqus is very nice and these new features are also exciting. The retweet feature runs the risk of being abused by online marketers that are already starting to spam on twitter… What is Disqus’revenue model?

  13. drew olanoff

    schweet!

  14. Leslie Poston

    I detest the pop ups. I love these new features. Without the pop ups I’d probably give Disqus a go right now on my blogs.

  15. Dan Lewis

    A feature request, while you are passing them on:I want a button which appears only for logged in users, which allows those users to flag/report a comment for admin review.The admins can be specified by the site/blog owner. That is,the site owner can hire/select a person whose job it is to review flagged comments, and either delete them (which would actually just remove them from the public eye and empower the site owner to reinstate them) or accept them, removing the flag. The admin would also have the power to prevent the flagging user from flagging in the future, and further prevent the flagged commenter from commenting in the future.Why I ask for this:One of the blogs I regularly read is a group blog with very active community of commenters; many posts get 100s of comments, and even throw-away “look at this link” posts get 10++. The blog is written by a group of academics, so it is not their full-time job (if a job at all). Their rule is that the author of the blog post is responsible for moderating the comment thread.The result is that at least one blogger opts to disallow comments on his posts. He’d rather not spend time moderating the comments, basically. He did for a while but stopped when it became too time consuming. Since he made this decision, he’s been writing more often — but obviously, there’s been no discussion of his posts.I’m certain a lot of solo bloggers turn off comments for the same reason. Greg Mankiw springs to mind — he’d almost certainly need to moderate his comments (although Robert Reich doesn’t, so who knows). And with a lot of professionals etc. blogging, even if you don’t have a community, the ability to hire someone — or more likely, a service — to moderate your blog comments would probably a good solution. But there’s no platform which can do it –> This comment.

    1. obscurelyfamous

      Thanks for the taking the time to write that out, Dan.

    2. fredwilson

      I’ve passed this on to the disqus teamThanks!

  16. BILLROMANOS

    Great new features. I look forward to using them.

  17. Keenan

    I hate waiting. I’m too impatient. Thanks for getting me all excited and with no action. :)I love the idea of simultaneously propagating and aggregating comments. It’s all about the conversation, keep it going boys. Well done!Is it ready yet? Dang, still not available . . . I’ll check back in an hour.

  18. CJ

    Disqus IS the best commenting system on the web. As you stated in a previous post, it turns comments into a forum-like atmosphere, which is is a great thing for discussions. I’m a believer.

  19. Greg

    Like a previous poster, I’m wondering about the revenue mode. Or, more specifically, will there be advertising, if so, how much, and can I buy out of it with some premium plan?

  20. zouril422

    Really Great

  21. bijan

    Really blown away with all of the great stuff coming out of Disqus.Fantastic.

  22. GiordanoBC

    I never got around signing up for Discus, but I’m doing it now, because of this feature. “liberating” comments in blogs and making easier for people to lead people to them is key to avoid blogs being excluded by the social media conversation. Good job! Even if it means I will now appear with another nick, since Giordano was taken already 🙂

  23. andyswan

    Love disqus and the new rollout sounds really awesome.But Digg? Really? That is some of the most worthless traffic and comments on the web.Careful….

  24. mdangear

    Disqus is a good comment system for bloggers, but not the best system for commenters.First it requires an install by the blogger, which means that it only works with a subset of the blogs where you may want to engage.Second because it is geared to work for the blogger, it still allows filtering of the comment by the blogger = censorship. While it is useful to get read of spam, it is also sometimes used to censor decents.Reframeit takes care of these 2 issues, so to me Reframeit is the best comment system on the web.

  25. WasatchGirl

    This is great! Excited for these features to become available for all users. Also, (in response to vanelsas) I like the pop-up that appears when you hoover over a commenter’s name. Perhaps the best approach is a settings option where the user can turn off this functionality if desired?

  26. Jeff Hilimire

    Thank you (and Disqus) for this great update! I can’t tell you how many times people have seen my blog post through my Twitter feed, gone to the post, read it, and come back and responded on Twitter with their comment. The divergence of the comments on the blog and Twitter has been a big problem for me. This is great stuff (and I just installed it on my blog http://www.jeffhilimire.com and can’t wait to publish my first post to test it out).

  27. Mark Hendy

    I saw the article go out on Mashable last week and immediately downloaded and installed the disqus plugin to my own blog. so far I’ve been impressed with what it offers, but have a few irks I’d like to see ironed out. For instance on this comment post I’ve logged in but the radial button below still says unclaimed, and I’m not at all confident that I really am logged in. It needs a bit of user feedback. Also I can’t login within my dashboard and have to visit the disqus site in a seperate tab to administer it which is a pain. I don’t want to be critical, this is more feedback than critisism. Conceptually the service rocks.

    1. fredwilson

      Thanks for the feedback

    2. mashable

      Mark,There is a “login to Disqus” button on Mashable – are you having difficulty with it?

  28. Leslie Poston

    Decided to give Disqus a go on Uptown Uncorked in spite of my reservations about the pop-ups. So far I love it, and the install to WP and import of old comments went smoothly. Between Disqus comments and Lijit search my users are getting great value while on my blog – awesome duo.

    1. fredwilson

      Yup. Great duo

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