The Web's Community Of Communities
Disqus quietly pushed this out in the past few weeks.
The cool thing is this is interactive, meaning you can click on any of those bubbles and get to the blog post and discussion. I've been doing that every morning in addition to my regular collection of discovery tools.
I think it does a great job of showcasing the diversity and energy of the Disqus community. Well done Disqus team.
Comments (Archived):
do the color choices have meaning?
good question. i don’t know.
Topical categories (e.g. Auto = blue) are all the same color. But this was used only to separate adjacent topics easily from a visual perspective. That’s why Tech is also blue (but it’s not adjacent to Auto). So….it’s a design thing.
thanks Jim
can you customize it? can you eliminate bubbles? can you create your own bubble; like “Chicago Bulls” for example?
Nope. It’s a showcase, not a product.
Semiotics, I guess? Whatever, nice.Anything that inches us away from the 1D world of the web is interesting.
Where do you pick it up?
there’s a link in the top of the blog post
Gives new meaning to the term “pop-up”.
last night was the best night of nba basketball i’ve seen in a long time. it was actually too good, i wanted to get more work done but got sucked in. love the spurs and their boring ass style of basketball! put the smackdown on the flashy splash brothers. old and boring > young and splash
So the Disqus Gravity visual looks like a bunch a basketballs, is that what you’re sayin’? OK, I get that.
Truth. There was nothing boring about the way Tony Parker was teaching Curry about how the grownups play.
Da Bulls. Talk about a gutsy run. Most of their top players hurt or sick, win Game 7 against the Nets in Brooklyn and Game 1 against the champs on the road in Miami. Nate Robinson is awesome-but I am loving Joakim Noah more and more. He is a winner.
noah is bringing the competitive spirit in full force.
He’s always had an incredibly competitive spirit (I hated him at FL), and now he’s compensating for D Rose’s lack thereof.
ouch brutal diss on d rose! the bulls seem to be giving him a break, although i’d really like to see him return, even now. if he’s doing full court practice it strikes me that at the very least he should be in uniform in the event of an emergency.
Jury is out on D Rose. Practice shape is a lot different than game shape. Who knows how bad that injury was? Must have really wrecked his knee to be out this long. I don’t like to see all the scorn being heaped on him right now.If a kid ever wanted tangible knowledge of the adage, “Defense wins championships”, they need to watch the Bulls. Sticky belly up defense.
Exactly. Full disclosure: I’m a fan of Rose’s. But would Jordan ever sit out if he were cleared? Howabout Kobe? We know that Westbrook wouldn’t. LeBron might. I just want him to give Robinson an occasional breather.
even what david lee did, where he was injured but just played a few minutes, is something i think would be cool. or just dressing up to increase uncertainty in the competitors. but yes, i really think he should play because the issue seems more psychological than physical at the moment.
I hope this was sarcasm. SA couldn’t stop Curry until the the fourth when they had someone other than Parker guard him. Look up Michael Jeffrey Jordan’s playoff stats and see how many times he scored at least 40 points and at least 10 assists. Off the top of my head its three. If the three at the end of the game rimmed in rather than out, people today would say Curry’s performance was one of the 15 best playoff performances ever.
Curry’s performance was amazing and, as usual, he was an absolute blast to watch. One my favorite guys in the league. I just meant that Curry looks like he’s 17 and Tony Parker (and the rest of the Spurs) are the league veterans. The way SA came back was very ‘veteran’ as well. Not super streaky a la LeBron’s comeback on the Pistons; slowish, steady, confident, Popovic.
” love the spurs and their boring ass style of basketball!”I love that. Anything can be art. Myself, I’ve taken up recently the study of pharmaceutical advertising commercials and how they are directed scene by scene to sell the product to the particular age group. It’s really pretty interesting seeing those boomer viagra ads. Art is anything you’ve learned to appreciate as your comment shows.How does disqus allow discovery of a comment like yours on a blog like this so that someone will say “hey that’s a place I’d like to hangout?”
they’re probably going to try to automate it. problem is, google, amazon, facebook, and twitter can probably all do it better, and i suspect google and amazon will be able to monetize it better also.
.That is called “fundamentals”.When you play fundamentally sound, non-gimmicky, basketball you can turn it up a notch because you are just doing more of the same old vanilla stuff. And everybody coming off the bench can contribute because it is fundamental.When you are going all gimmicky, highly athletic stuff — you have to come up with a new gimmick. And not everyone coming off the bench has a gimmick or is highly athletic.The Spurs did not invent basketball but they are perfecting it.JLM.
#truth
this is your tejas bias seeping in! a team of cheese eating european immigrants, too! if we let putzes like this perfect anything we’d all be speaking german right now! (love goading on the venerable jlminnie 🙂
Neat. The number of comments in the circle do not appear to match the total comments for that particular blog/article. I found several instances of this.
Likely has something to do with polling frequency. Finding trends requires a step back and a snapshot over a pre-determined time period. Comments get posted to articles in real-time, but a trend analysis is done over a fixed time interval.
Jim – If it’s your whole shebang why would there be a need to poll at all?That info is real time to disqus it’s not residing on some web server that the blog is hosting where it needs to be slurped.”but a trend analysis is done over a fixed time interval”—> “The number of comments in the circle do not appear to match the total comments”Question relates to, say, a balance sheet not an income statement.That said something separate showing trends would be nice of course.
Maybe “polling” was the wrong word here.I’m no dev, designer, or architect on this. So, sorry, I can’t clarify.
Here’s the blog post we (@disqus) put out last week on this:http://blog.disqus.com/post…
Jim, this is exceptional.
Glad you like it @iMacPhail:disqus
Is this all HTML 5?
Dunno
probably uses html5 canvas ..reminds me a lot of Mr Doobs ball pool code http://www.mrdoob.com/proje…
All of the nodes are simple HTML divs, styled with CSS. The animation and interaction is powered by D3.js. We explored the use of Canvas and SVG, but ultimately found the tools didn’t provide quite precise level of design control we wanted.
Cool. Thanks for sharing!
Very nice. Reminds me a little of the old Digg Labs.As someone starting down the path of creating visualization tools for large sets of data….any tips or lessons learned?
Bad word filters. Use lots of bad word filters. ;-)In truth, I’m no dev. So I can’t offer much color there.
Vince, the designer who built Gravity, will be talking about the development process on our blog soon (probably sometime this week). So, check there for more details. http://blog.disqus.com
Thanks for the compliments! There are certainly many challenges in trying to visualize a large network. As the team worked through various iterations, a couple data visualization principles helped keep us focused.First, when visualizing a large network, it’s important not to try and show the entire network (unless you’re just visualizing sheer volume).Second, establishing an emotional connection will keep viewers more engaged. We hoped to accomplish this through playful aesthetics, and fun animations and interactions – the way nodes are draggable, bouncing around the canvas and reacting to each other, for example.Like Amanda mentioned, be sure to check the Disqus blog later this week for a more detailed write-up on the design process behind Gravity.
Andy, as someone who is also going down that same path I’ve concluded that those “tools” should be very simplistic art. Vince achieved that.I spent some time looking at your .com site and found several very special photos: Marilyn, Dean & Frank, and Nicholson. Enjoyed the content but wondering if there is actually an ‘end’.
Hey Andy, just wanted to let you know that @vincelane:disqus’s post describing the development of Gravity is live on our blog: http://blog.disqus.com/post… Let us know what you think, or if you have any additional questions about the process!
that’s an epic discussion that followed on the company blog post!
For sure! We have a vibrant community of publishers and commenters that chime in a lot. As it should be with regard to all things Disqus.
Appropriate!
why the name “gravity”?
Ya got me. I think it has something to do with the gravitational pull of the planets. But instead of planets, they’re topical categories represented as planets and adjacent moons (comments) revolving around them.That, or it just sounds cool.
Does sound cool.
I’m the designer who worked on this project. We thought a playful astronautic theme could serve as a fun metaphor for providing a wide-view snapshot of the Disqus network.Disqus Gravity visualizes the Disqus universe: solar systems made up of related content, pulled together by respective gravitational fields.
Thanks Vince. Love the name and the explanation!
Thanks, I’m happy there’s curiosity around the project :-)I’m working on a write-up to explain in a bit more detail what the design process looked like, and how we arrived at this solution. Check the Disqus blog later this week!
Their version of trending topics it seems.Note that it is impossible to discover AVC here unless I’m using it incorrectly. They claim their ‘gravity’ is real time push but must be delayed as the tech topics showing up have 3 or less comments.
you’re already on avc. you’ve already discovered it. settle down, have some green juice and/or natural wines. or whatever.
This is visually brilliant
The web is still a bit like PCs were before GUIs.An interesting first crack at it.
Nice analogy. I suspect we both feel the same way re: screens and the legacy UX/UI needing a quantum-leap.
Having now spent more time with it, that was an understatement. Actually, I’m going to make the person who created this a co-founder.
Very nice, reminds me of a web app a guy is making in Chicago called weavethepeople.com He does it for groups and organizations.
It’s a shame the links are rendered in the typically old-fashioned web-page style of whoever the publisher is but of course one enters a whole new domain of problems if aggregating news from others and not at least displaying the host landing-page by way of gratitude for content provision. Ah well, one day…I’m sick of ‘screens’ anyway 🙂
this is really cool… I give disqus a hard time about functionality/ mobile/ etc – but this is pretty sweet. #WellPlayed
UX is cute and it’s a good MVP for Disqovery.Keep it coming, Disqus. Discovery is a big deal. It’s not a small and shy feature.
“disqovery” – I like that. A great word for disqus to use for this, but bad for this startup to use:http://www.disqovery.com/ho… (registered 11/2012)
It reminds of disco more than discovery. Was just teasing them 🙂 Good thing we have LE who is always thinking about the domains implications!
Gravity is meant to be a playful hint at potential future Disqus products. I see that wasn’t lost on you 😉
I know a thing or two about commenting 🙂
There’s a great insight in the Disqus blog post introducing this: “There’s a difference between what people click and share and what they actually take the time to comment on and participate in.” What people share doesn’t get necessarily commented on, but what is commented on a lot is going to be shared for sure.I’ve always believed that commenting and discussion participation is the highest and most valuable form of social engagement. If anyone is going to surface that well, it’s Disqus. They have the data.
Bingo.
I believe so, too. That is why I’m working on a commenting platform.
This is nice and has promise. But needs work because it’s to difficult for your eye to focus (wiggle movement which reminds me of when you want to rearrange iphone apps – as well as positioning of elements). Additionally there should be a way to either enlarge the things you care about [1] to take up more screen space or get rid of the things you don’t care about or to program in keywords.For example where are people commenting this morning about the story about Christies lap band surgery?[1] Say click on the business circle and have it take up the screen with those stories or be able to arrange the gravity that you care about.
now if only the entire web would adopt disqus, this app would have even greater value (i mean that, despite the tongue in cheek element).
its really interesting …neat to see new little bubbles appear with what appears to be trending content in them.i dont quite undersand the ability to drag the bubbles around.
Last evening I attended a book signing event with author Jaron Lanier, he has a new book out called “Who owns the future”. In it he discusses the accumulation of power and wealth in a few large computers, he refers to them as the facebook’s, google’s etc of the world.I am writing this comment in the context of what Disqus is doing and how they plan to be generating growth and revenue. Also it ties in with how USV invests and what it means for the future.It was a interesting discussion and I wonder how Mr.Wilson views Jaron Lanier’s take on things. I reserved a copy at my library but based on what was discussed I agree with a lot of what Mr.Lanier has written about and spoke about last evening.To top it of I got a picture of him wearing a pair of google glass, the guy who coined the term Virtual Reality wearing them was in a way surreal.Here is a the pic..
Last evening I attended a book signing event with author Jaron Lanier, he has a new book out called “Who owns the future”. In it he discusses the accumulation of power and wealth in a few large computers, he refers to them as the facebook’s, google’s etc of the world.I am writing this comment in the context of what Disqus is doing and how they plan to be generating growth and revenue. Also it ties in with how USV invests and what it means for the future.It was a interesting discussion and I wonder how Mr.Wilson views Jaron Lanier’s take on things. I reserved a copy at my library but based on what was discussed I agree with a lot of what Mr.Lanier has written about and spoke about last evening.To top it of I got a picture of him wearing a pair of google glass, the guy who coined the term Virtual Reality wearing them was in a way surreal.Cant seem to get to post the picture here, keeps failing to upload even though it is under 2MB.
do you want me to delete the duplicate?
yes please…
i have a lot of time for Jaron Lanier.
Is it community or the fact that individuals in communities overlap in terms of topics discussed?
What’s great about this is that it’s a natural bread-crumbing mechanism for discovering interesting discussions. The one question that I have is whether that’s the right type of UI for driving users to track daily or several times daily, ala Techmeme. It’s cool, but a bit labs-y.
The Osmos-like UI is cute but not intuitive or information-dense in the Tufte style: why can you drag bubbles if it has no effect? Is bubble size or color correlated with importance or relevance? Twitter’s #discover is context-aware and hence much more useful. I have enough web services trying to update me on the Kardashians’ latest.
love disqus and team – (biased investor) but I see a HUGE glaring hole in this visual…NO FINANCE/MARKETS…Daniel et al… build in the stocktwits api oauth and lets surface the best financial content too long form from all the financial bloggers on our network using disqus.
I know it’s there. We saw a ton of finance discussions when we were working with their API. I agree it’s a needed category.
just sent this comment to daniel so he sees it. you are right.
Totally. This Gravity viz is a bit of a tech demo, but we do have the capability of surfacing the finance/markets content just as easily. It’s gonna happen!
i live it ! , Just because your beach bag is filled with magazines, your iPod, and your towel, doesnt mean you can leave the sunscreen behind.
Nice, but discus also recently added “discovery” to their commenting system, which defaulted to placing adds on blogs without any direct consent from publishers. Not cool, if you ask me.
Hey! That’s cool.
Would love to see Health and Wellness as a topic bubble.
Just a quick update. For those curious, I wrote a blog post today that walks through the design thinking behind Gravity: http://blog.disqus.com/post…