Disqus is a commenting system that you can plug in to your website or blog. It allows for threaded conversations, email notifications of new comments, and video comments. All tools to help your commentors get more out of commenting on your site. I’ve recently rolled it out on this site as well as a few other sites I have. I thought this would also be the perfect opportunity for the latest installment of a 5 question interview. Daniel Ha is co-founder and CEO of Disqus. I emailed Daneil 5 questions about Disqus and himself. Below are his answers.
Daniel Ha - Co-founder of Disqus
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How is Disqus doing? It seems a lot of the online chatter about Disqus has died down since Fred Wilson helped provide funding and major bloggers like Dave Winer switched to Disqus. Is that indicative of the adoption you’re seeing?
Disqus is doing pretty well. We have a great community of commenters and sites using Disqus which, as of this month, is growing at its fastest rate ever. We recently added two people to the team and have been working on a few new things, including an imminent major release. I pay a lot of attention to the online chatter you mention, and I’ve actually been seeing more chatter about blog discussion and comment systems.
When we first launched the service, there was a lot of blog posts and buzz because we were doing something a little new. Fortunately, the premise we’ve helped introduce has become better recognized (with assistance from the handful of competing services to Disqus) and the overall novelty has worn a bit. Of course, we’ve also been a little quiet in the last month as we focused on improving Disqus. We’ll be making more noise very soon.
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What technology did you use to write Disqus? Why did you choose it? How has it scaled?
Disqus uses Django, a Python web framework. We chose Django for a few reasons: a) it allowed us to rapidly prototype and develop; b) we are big fans of Python; c) it’s powerful and easily extensible; d) there was a growing, passionate community behind it.
Disqus isn’t a destination site, but rather a service that runs across so many different websites. We ran into challenges, both typical and particularly interesting ones. There was a long period during the summer where we devoted much our time and energy into rewriting parts of core Disqus so that we are able to scale much easier moving forward. We’re very confident of our scalability and performance today.
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What has been the largest hurdle for Disqus so far? Adoption? Finances? Scalability?
Our largest hurdle was communicating our goals for the service to potential users. We had to package up our thoughts and philosophy around building Disqus and offer something tangibly beneficial to people discovering Disqus for the first time.
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What has been your biggest personal learning experience from starting and working on Disqus?
It’s hard to say. I’ve learned so much about the many aspects that Disqus has gone on to touch upon: startups, web communities, scaling web applications, user experience, embracing feedback, the importance of customer feedback, the dynamics of new and current media… many many things.
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What new online technology has you most excited these days? Why?
I love new services that takes older mediums, such as print media and television, and breathes new life into them without radically changing our existing behavior. I feel that Disqus is in a good position to achieve this if we continue to innovate in this area.