There are numerous updates to the Disqus site design. As of today, Disqus has went from this:

to this:

You'll notice that there is an entirely new layout and color scheme for everything. However, one thing fans of Disqus will appreciate is the emphasis that has been placed on the most important aspects of the service. For example, there's a lot more emphasis in the site design on management options for comments and threads. It's a lot easier to jump directly to the original comment's link and options that used to appear hidden are much more noticeable now.

A Shift in Perspectives

The site has also shifted to the user as the focal point instead of the sites that are being managed using Disqus. This could be due to the fact that users are starting to sign up to the Disqus service to claim their comments, but not integrate their commenting system into their blogs. In doing so, the profile page for Disqus users has an entirely new meaning and design. The profile page will now serve as a comment blog for users and the redesign only serves to confirm the shift.

Much More Under the Hood

Disqus as also released new APIs for developers to allow for deeper and better Disqus apps and integrations. New platform integrations include:

• SEO friendly comments


• Automatic data sync between Disqus and the local database


• Seamless import/export of old and new comments


• Comment moderation from the WordPress Admin

Disqus now hosts comments for over 30,000 websites. With a substantial amount of growth and backing from numerous major hitters including Robert Scoble and two writers from ReadWriteWeb, we expect to see more great things from Disqus in the future!

Real-time commenting system Disqus came out this morning with a bunch of numbers, including "10 million" (how many dollars it just secured). The battle for commenting solutions on the Web has clearly not died just because Facebook jumped in the ring.

As a matter of fact, Disqus co-founder and CEO Daniel Ha says the company has grown immensely over recent years and he has the numbers to back it up...Facebook comments, be damned.

Disqus says that it reaches nearly 500 million unique visitors per month across the 750,000 websites using its commenting system. Over the last year, that's an increase of 500%, with much of that growth in recent months. As a matter of fact, the company says it was at only 200 million uniques per month last November, meaning it has more than doubled unique visitors in six months. The post also mentions a recent study by Lijit, which it says that Disqus is used by 75% of websites that use a third-party commenting system.

We asked Ha about how things have gone since Facebook really jumped in the arena and he pointed out (as did we earlier this year) that Facebook comments have actually been around for a while now, yet Disqus is still growing.

"Facebook Comments have been around for almost 2 years and we've grown around 600% in the last year. Facebook's latest update to their widget hasn't chipped away at our growth, from the metrics we pay attention to. Our daily publisher install rate has grown about 20% since late February when Facebook had their latest announcement. The biggest impact is that Facebook is asked about by tech press and industry peers, but honestly we've had great success with media properties and publishers who are switching to Disqus after trying alternatives," said Ha.

In addition to leaving more comments, people using pseudonyms are more likely to leave comments that get "likes" from other readers, according to Disqus, which operates blog commenting platforms for about one million Web sites, including ReadWriteWeb.

Disqus is one of the more than 400,000 Web sites that lets people use their Facebook profiles to leave comments. But Disqus said just 4% of its users preferred to use Facebook to leave comments with their real name, compared to 61% who used pseudonyms and 35% who logged in anonymously.

Of course Disqus has a vested interest in convincing publishers to allow anonymous comments and remarks left under a pseudonym.

But the company is maintaining that, based on its review of 500,000 comments left using its system, 61% of the comments left by those types of users gained positive reviews from other readers, as opposed to 51% for comments left by people using their identity and 34% for people who remained anonymous.

If you're familiar with Twitter (or even Facebook these days), then you might recognize the new feature just released by real-time comment system Disqus: @mentions.

Originally started on Twitter, the @ symbol has quickly become the character of choice for directing comments toward a certain recipient. Now, the symbol has made its way to the popular commenting service, allowing users to mention others in the conversation and even pull other people into the conversation.

The @ feature released today by Disqus allows users to not only mention other users who are participating in the conversation, but also Twitter users.

"Before @mentions, commenting threads were an island. There wasn't a way to reach out to people who weren't already participating. Now with @mentions, you can call out your friends or friendly social media gurus, and get them involved in the conversation," the company explains on its blog. An @mention of a Disqus user sends an email notification, while an @mention of a Twitter user sends a Twitter @mention from @DISQUS_Mentions, Disqus' "Spiffy Twitter bot."

With Facebook Comments, the engagement driver is simple and obvious. Facebook. When you post a comment, you can chose to share it on your timeline and even include a full link to the story on your newsfeed.

Disqus has been insistent that Facebook hasn't been an issue. "Facebook's latest update to their widget hasn't chipped away at our growth, from the metrics we pay attention to," Ha told us earlier this week. Still, we think it needs to continue making moves like this to keep publishers from making the switch.

That, and the feature is just neat. @mention me in the comments below.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

Community managers who don't have their own custom-made evaluation systems will love this, because it provides them an easy-to-use social ranking system in plug-n-play format. Once the beta is released, it will show up in the interface as another feature in the menu list.

The site owner or manager can use a preferences list to calibrate from "most important" to "least important" the weight that each of a certain type of interaction has on the network or the blog.

Then, he can create custom titles for each of those qualifications and assign them to users. At Fred Wilson's blog, AVC, for example, Wilson is going with a bar theme and assigning himself the title of bartender. He assigns different types of users other titles, like regular, or semi-regular, depending on how often they visit the site and how often they leave a comment.

The new features would be an improvement over straight-up commenting, especially since social search and discovery seems to be a huge trend developing Web communities. It's no longer enough for a site manager or a publisher to make commenting available to build the community. The new move seems to be towards being able to identify experts within the blog or the network.

Screenshot comes from Fred Wilson's AVC blog

Whether a story is hot off the wire or just plain hot, you'll know it with our special new "Top Story", "Breaking" and 'Featured" badges.

New story capsules

Right below the first story on the RWW homepage, you'll see a much-improved visual capsule featuring some of our newest and most popular stories. Sharp!

More sharing options

In the example below, you'll notice that there are now sharing options available to you in the post preview. For our main channel stories, we're including the latest share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and our newest addition, StumbleUpon. For our six additional content channels, we'll be experiementing with new share buttons from popular tech sites including Reddit and Hacker News. On the bottom of each story, you have additional sharing choices available including email, print, and additional ShareThis options. We'll be constantly monitoring the performance of each service and adjust the buttons based on what our community interacts with the most.

Introducing Disqus commenting

This is huge. After getting by for a long time on Movable Type's native commenting, we're thrilled to be launching Disqus site-wide today. In the short few weeks that Disqus has been running in beta on some of our content channels, the increase in conversation has been evident. The even better news is that since we're running the VIP version of Disqus, we have an arsenal of tools that will make the experience even better, including rich analytics and insights that will help us better understand how you consume and interact with our stories. We'll also have the ability to really pimp the aesthetics. What you're seeing now is a fairly out-of-the-box Disqus implementation, but in the coming weeks you'll start noticing very cool tweaks and hacks.

In the meantime, we encourage you to take full advantage by logging in with your Disqus account or through one of the many authentication options including Twitter, Facebook and OpenID. Beginning in 2011, we're going to begin showcasing our most active community members in all kinds of fun ways. So while you'll still be able to comment anonymously, having a commenting identity (complete with a snazzy avatar) will definitely have its advantages.

More cowbell coming!

While everyone here is excited about today's launch of new features, what you're seeing is only phase one. We'd love your feedback on this round of enhancements, and if you've got suggestions for future ones, please leave them in the comments.

A big thank you to our tech team for making this all happen!

In addition to the service itself provided by the web site, YackTrack's creator, Rob Diana of Regular Geek quickly responded to user feedback and added a YackTrack bookmarklet, a suggestion that our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick proposed in the comments of the post.

Another feature that was quickly added was a YackTrack link that bloggers could include on each of their blog posts. This idea came from Colin Walker.

What's New

YackTrack has now received another update. Besides scouring the web for comments on service like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress, YackTrack's URL search now includes Blogger/Blogspot searches as well as Google Blog Search. Also, FriendFeed search results now include what service generated the result.

However, the big news in this update is yhe new feature on YackTrack called "Chatter," which now has its own tab on the site. This feature is a bit different than the standard YackTrack URL search. Instead, Chatter allows you to perform keyword searches on the social web. On Chatter, you can search Mixx, Technorati, Google Blog Search, FriendFeed, and Twitter (currently powered by Summize, but that will change in the future).

YackTrack Chatter

Finally, the YackTrack UI got a little refresh too, giving the site a cleaner, more professional look and feel.

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan began developing Tejit in 2007 as a personal project when he became frustrated reading duplicate content from the 1000+ blogs he had bookmarked. Since then, Tejit has expanded its analysis capabilities across millions of blogs. Tejit's semantic-analysis engine uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic matching technology to identify topics, sentiments and entities present in web content.

A Flawed Tradition

According to SezWho CEO, Jitendra Gupta,

The traditional method of content discovery based on the similarity of content is not adequate for connecting conversation across social sites in a meaningful way. A new level of context-sensitive, semantic discovery is required to reflect all the layers of users' participation across the social web, and to track their contributions in a way that is universally relevant both within and across communities.

There's no doubt that the traditional rating system for comments has its flaws. In a post titled "Disqus Clout: Fail!", Phil Glockner of Scribkin points out one of the biggest flaws of comment rating systems using Disqus as an example. In the comments section, Louis Gray sums up the problem nicely:

I would expect it rewards those who comment most frequently, and wouldn't be so much a subjective view.

More Than Just A Rating System

Instead of replacing your comment system, SezWho aims to augment the conversations. Keeping the aforementioned flaw in mind, SezWho considers two important factors that: distributed conversations and the people behind them. SezWho provides a meta network information around participants and context. The context has information from various platforms to allow data and content to reside within the community. The service captures valuable information about the history and expertise of individual contributors. Community ratings are only a portion of the cumulative rankings for an overall score.

SezWho provided us with a comparison chart to better demonstrate the differences between what SezWho offers versus competitors Disqus and Intense Debate, which we've previously reviewed.

Adding Noise or Resolving Issues?

With all that SezWho adds, it can be argued that some of it will amount to more noise for users. While, we've previously used SezWho here on ReadWriteWeb to enhance our community, some of our writers are using the less complicated Disqus platform on their personal blogs. We wonder if the amount of blog coverage has also affected SezWho's userbase compared to Disqus, which has seen tremendous coverage since its launch.

With SezWho, other important issues are being tackled beyond their enhanced reputation system such as keeping track of conversations over a plethora of platforms and enabling a more sophisticated way to discover relevant content. SezWho aims to enhance communities rather than replace them,but can they filter the noise that's add everyday?

The way the Backtype Connect WordPress plugin works is fairly straightforward with no additional registration needed. After installation and activation on a WordPress standalone blog, the plugin queries the BackType Connect database with the article URLs and starts importing them in to the WordPress comment database, including a footnote with a source of the comment. Icons for all of the BT Connect services are also included so that the comments indicate clearly where they are coming from.

I took an hour this morning and installed BT Connect on my personal blog, Scribkin. Installation when smoothly, but I will warn you that if you are using a comment system that is a full replacement for the one built in to WordPress (like Intense Debate or Disqus) you won't see what Backtype Connect is doing since it is acting directly on the built-in comment database. The new comments will only start showing up after a sync. If, however, you are using other WordPress comment enhancement systems like SezWho and JS-Kit, there shouldn't be any problem.

Izea, formerly known as PayPerPost, has a pretty sketchy history, but also a lot of users. Izea is a "social media marketing" company that pays bloggers small amounts of money for posting blog posts about Izea's advertisers. Izea's PayPerPost product especially came under heavy fire from bloggers in its early days, as it didn't require disclosure of the advertising content from its bloggers and was generally seen as misleading. Even today, there are still questions about Izea's disclosure policy.

SezWho is going to work with Izea's SocialSpark, a marketplace and community which connects advertisers with bloggers who are willing to write sponsored posts. SocialSpark will start using SezWho to provide its users with a way of tracking blog comments and reputation.

Given that Google has already banned all PayPerPost users by indexing them with a Pagerank of zero, it seems Izea is interested in creating a different ratings system for its users by leveraging SezWho's technology.

Entrecard

Entrecard provides bloggers with a blog-to-blog advertising widget and will give SezWho users who receive ratings of 4 stars or more with credits to advertise on its network of blogs. This is an interesting approach, as it connects reputation with a direct reward. Through this deal, Entrecard will get a stronger foothold among bloggers who are already working with SezWho and probably hopes that SezWho's users will return to actually buy real advertising after having tried out the free ads.

Creative Weblogging

SezWho's deal with Creative Weblogging, an international blog network, is probably the most straightforward of these announcements. Creative Weblogging will enable SezWho's technology among its network of blogs. SezWho advertises that it can greatly increase the number of comments on blogs. This is something the Creative Weblogging network could definitely use, as most of its blogs are currently getting close to zero comments on average.

SezWho

Overall, this is an interesting, yet somewhat desperate, move by SezWho. In terms of publicity, it has been in the shadow of similar ventures like Disqus and Intense Debate. By adding a number of more formal and visible partners, SezWho looks like it is trying to gain back a bit of mind share among publishers.

At the same time, though, at least two of the partners they have chosen, Izea and Creative Weblogging, don't exactly have great reputations. Izea has a history of deceptive advertising and a lot of content on Creative Weblogging looks rather spammy, too (though there are also a few good blogs in the network as well). Entrecard, while an interesting service, is also mostly a niche player, which will probably get a lot more out of this partnership than SezWho itself.

You may recognize that metallic crunching sound from the comments section on ReadWriteWeb or many of the other big blogs, or perhaps out in the wild on Twitter. FAKEGRIMLOCK stomps around the Web, thriving on code, coffee, beer, bacon and the bones of stupid human bloggers and commenters. Mostly out of fear of becoming his NO EAT FRIDAY meal, I sat down with FAKEGRIMLOCK to ask him what he wants. After devouring everyone else at the table, he turned to me and said, "HERE INTERVIEW. OR ELSE."

***ReadWriteWeb:** Many of us know you from the comments on major tech blogs. Why do you like tech blogs?*

ME, GRIMLOCK, MAIN SKILLS LACK OF SOCIAL GRACE, OVERBLOWN REGARD OF OWN OPINION, AND OBSESSION WITH IRRELEVANT MINUTIAE. TECH BLOGS PERFECT FIT!

***RWW:** Which are more challenging in the industry right now: technical problems or human problems? Why?*

ALL PROBLEMS HUMAN PROBLEMS.

HUMANS TRY TO FIX THOSE PROBLEMS SINCE FIRST CAVEMAN HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO BOSS WHY INTEGRATE FIRE WITH LOINCLOTH NOT GOING TO WORK.

***RWW:** What technological problem do you most want solved?*

BROWSER. SHOULD BE WINDOW TO INTERNET. IT NOT JOB OF WINDOW TO BREAK THING YOU LOOKING AT DEPENDING ON WHAT WINDOW YOU USE.

***RWW:** Let's pretend it's NO EAT FRIDAY for big Web companies. Who gets eaten first? Who do you save for later?*

EAT FACEBOOK. NO NEED MICROSOFT FOR INTERNET.

SAVE TWITTER. THEM ONLY ONES FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO "BE USEFUL" AND "DON'T BE EVIL" AT SAME TIME.

***RWW:** What Web services does a big, hungry dinosaur like you use every day, and why?*

TWITTER. BECAUSE THAT WHERE GRIMLOCK LIVE.

GMAIL. BECAUSE IT WEB MAIL THAT SUCK LEAST.

***RWW:** Android or iOS?*

IOS. SPEND ALL DAY FIX COMPUTER. NOT NEED FIX PHONE TOO.

***RWW:** Where can puny humans find you and follow you?*

TWITTER: @FAKEGRIMLOCK

SITE ME TOO LAZY TO MAKE NICE: FAKEGRIMLOCK.COM

Previously, Googlebot was not able to read JavaScript within an iframe, which meant it did not find Facebook comments on websites. Now it has the ability to index some dynamic comments, but not all.

Here's how Facebook commenting will look in Google Search, courtesy of SearchEngineLand.

Now that Google indexes Facebook comments, websites have more incentive to install the add-on. Here's another example of a comment thread, plus the subsequent Google search for that thread.

Update: The IBTimes reported that Disqus comments are also searchable, yet when we performed a search they did not come up. I grabbed this comment from a MoveOn.org post about abortion rights. (full disclosure: I was the Associate Editor of MoveOn.org before coming to ReadWriteWeb. MoveOn uses the commenting platform Disqus.com.)

I couldn't find this comment through a Google Search.

As labnol.org reports, "some of these commenting engines are implemented in JavaScript and hence search engines may not be able to read /index the comments that visitors are writing on your web pages."

Last April, BackType released its first Wordpress plugin. Unlike the original plugin, which features comments from sources like Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed,Reddit and other blogs, the new plugin only focuses on Twitter.

Installing the plugin is straightforward. If you use Wordpress, you can find the plugin and instructions for installing it here. If you use another blog engine, the widget can be found here. You don't need to register with BackType to use this service.

If nobody has tweeted anything interesting about your site yet, BackType will give your readers the option to send a tweet right from the widget. Sadly, BackType didn't integrate a re-tweet feature into the plugin, which would have made the service even more useful for publishers.

Here is the new BackType widget in action:

BackType is obviously working in a crowded market. As a search engine, it has to compete with successful startups like OneRiot, while its plugin competes with more complete offerings from Disqus and JS-Kit. At the same time, though, the simplicity of the plugin is its greatest strength. If you don't want to replace your current comment system but would like to bring in more discussions from Twitter to your blog, the new BackType plugin is definitely worth a look.

Installing Echo is just as easy as installing the plugins of its competitors like Intense Debate or Disqus - which is dealing with a major spam problem these days. JS-Kit provides plugins for WordPress and Blogger, as well as a code-snippet for other blogging platforms.

The Best Things in Life Aren't Free

It's important to point out, though, that the most interesting features, including real-time updates and comment aggregation from third-party sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are not available in the free version of Echo. The free version includes most of the core features of Echo, including the ability to share comments on Twitter and Facebook, nested replies, moderation tools, and customization.

For $98 a year, paying users will get access to Echo's aggregation features and real-time updates. JS-Kit also offers a white-label solution with priority support, as well as OEM integration.

It's good to see some development in the blog commenting market again. After a flurry of announcement and product releases last year, development and new product releases markedly slowed down this year, even though the growth of Twitter and Facebook only intensified the problem of comment fragmentation.

Devised by myself and Phil Glockner of Scribkin, we recently talked for a few hours about the overflow of feeds and the repetition of certain topics and sites. With so much more out there to see, there were only a limited amount of ways to get to them without jeopardizing what was already amounting to information overload. This is where RSS Reset Month comes in. Here's the plan and list of rules:

1. Keep feeds that track web site buzz (business-impacting).
2. Allow feeds such as Disqus, Intense Debate or other low-volume feeds that are necessary for timely work decisions.
3. Allow adding as many Google Reader Shared Items feeds as needed.
4. Allow adding of aggregate, smart or keyword-filtered feeds such as RSSmeme FriendFeed Friends or TechMeme.
5. Allow adding smaller site feeds. We set the upper limit for a small site to be 200 at the time of adding. This can be re-visited if the number is too small.
6. Allowance process: If a site feed is so unique that it is not being covered by the processes defined above, an allowance will be made to subscribe to a direct feed to any site. The number of allowances can not exceed 10.

RSS Reset will be in effect for an entire month. Be sure to back up your original OPML file just in case you want to give it a try and decide not to continue at some point. Meanwhile, you can check out what Phil and I are adding on Toluu (Corvida, Phil). All the feeds added will also be conveniently "retweeted" on Twitter.

What's the Point?

Finding new content is hard enough. Finding new subscriptions while keeping up with your current subscriptions can be even tougher. Subscribing to more aggregation sites and smaller quality blogs will allow you to venture into unexplored territories, while giving the "little guys" a chance to be heard.

If you'd like to sign up for Toluu and join in on the fun, leave a comment down below.