Disqus

Disqus, founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan, is advanced blog comment management software that has already been adopted by over 4,000 blogs. Some of the key features of the funded startup include threading to facilitate discussion, spam filtering, mobile posting and replying, commenter profiles to expose credibility and web presence, discussion management, and of course the social standards (following friends' comments, rating comments and blog widgets). While still in school, Daniel and Jason developed the software early last year and were seeded by Y Combinator in Summer 2007. Since then, the two moguls have raised another round from Union Square Ventures and angel investors including Paul Graham (the brains behind Y Combinator), Naval Ravikant, Howard Lindzon, and Aydin Senkut. According to an interview with Mark Evans, the two founders were working on better tools for online group and forum discussions when they realized the opportunity to utilize the software to enhance the conversations that happen on blogs. Taking a step back and looking from a bird's eye view, the shift to from forums to blogs made sense for Disqus; the blogosphere is growing rapidly and blogs bare a striking resemblance to typical forum structure. The blog author is in effect the lead or moderator and the commenters are the participants in the discussion.

Another apparent goal of Disqus is to create communities within the blogosphere much like MyBlogLog. The greater movement toward making blogs more social is advised, but social networks, as we all know, are only effective if they can grow their greatest asset: users. However, usership doesn't seem to be a problem for Disqus who reportedly have over 4,000 blogs and 80,000 commenters. What I find truly remarkable is that the founders have been able to expand their user base and raise significant capital with no clearly defined marketing or monetization strategies. According to Daniel, the site has been self-propagating, growing mostly due to the adoption of influential bloggers and commenters. Monetization is not currently in the cards, as the company continues to focus on refining the software. My best guess is that they will begin to up-sell their users, offering premium services to eager bloggers and blog readers. Another interesting concept could be live commenting in the form of instant messages. Plaxo Pulse, a social dashboard for contact management we reviewed a while back, recently integrated the Disqus software, suggesting that it is preferred over major competitors JS-Kit, Tangler and SezWho. But the race isn't over. We'll be eager to see which of these services can profit the most from their services.