Disqus, the distributed commenting system, has announced $500,000 in new funding, lead by Union Square Ventures with participation from Knight's Bridge Capital Partners and angel investors Naval Ravikant and Aydin Senkut. Additionally, the company has released “Beta 2” – a slew of new features for both sites that use Disqus to power their comments and for users of the system.
Community pages give each site that uses Disqus their own page where they can keep track all of their comments and top community members. In this example for Mathew Ingram’s blog, you can see all of his recent posts, the comments on them, and who his top commenters are. There is also a “community” area where you can see people that participate on his site and click to view their profiles. You can also see the most recent comments site-wide. In a sense, this is a bit like a MyBlogLog community, except it’s better connected to the people that actually participate on your blog by way of conversation.
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For commenters that use Disqus, the main new feature is allowing user profiles to pop-up within the comment area, which publishers will like too, since it means reader’s don’t leave their blog. These profiles include recent comments, Twitter status, and links to other services the user has added to their Disqus profile. The company details some other new features in a blog post.
In addition to the funding and new features, Disqus is pointing to some numbers that show them as the leader in the distributed commenting space. Compete shows them with a big lead over competitors SezWho and Intense Debate, attracting 124,000 unique visitors in the US last month. According to their own stats, Disqus is being used by about 4,000 different blogs and has nearly 60,000 commenters using the system.