Popular commenting platform Disqus is adding a big upgrade to its central dashboard today that makes the service feel much more like a social network — sort of like a Twitter for comments.
For those who haven’t used Disqus, the service lets you create one profile for all of your comments across any of the hundreds of thousands of sites that support it (we use it on TechCrunch). The Disqus Dashboard gives you a central hub to view all the discussions you’ve participated in, but until now it hasn’t done such a great job helping you find your friends’ comments, or letting you discover users that you may enjoy following. That’s changing with today’s update.
The biggest new feature is the ability to follow other users. It works as you’d expect — once you’ve followed someone, you’ll see their comments show up in your main activity stream. The Dashboard also includes a ‘Find friends to follow’ widget to help you find interesting content.
Of course, you don’t really have to use the Dashboard if you don’t want to (and my hunch is that many Disqus users only visit it very sporadically, if at all). That may start to change with these new features, though.
Other improvements include the ability to remove or edit comments you’ve left directly from your Dashboard, instead of having to visit the publisher’s sites.