Intense Debate’s Commenting System Out Of Beta And Very Open
Nick Gonzalez
43 comments »
The battle over blog comments is heating up even more with TechStar’s Intense Debate coming out of beta along with Disqus today.
While we covered the service’s private beta previously, stepping out of beta is more than just opening up their sign ups. They’re opening up their entire commenting system as well.
The new version will feature several enhancements to help publishers feel less squeamish about getting locked into someone else’s comment system. The system comes with full OpenID support, comment migration, and full feeds of your comments. This means Intense Debate won’t control your user’s log-ins. Publishers can migrate all their blogs comments onto Intense Debate and back to their blog’s original system without losing any of their comments. Finally, full XML support makes it easy to grab all your comments on demand.
The upgrade still includes Intense Debate’s original comment enhancements including threaded comments, spam control, a reputation system, rich user profiles, and ability to track user’s comments across all Intense Debate enabled blogs. It features some cosmetic enhancements, such as a comment skin that automatically matches your blogs color scheme and the option for users to expand or contract comments on a blogs main page, instead of clicking through to a dedicated page. All together, it’s a much richer offering than SezWho, which focuses mainly on maintaining user reputation and not syndication and networking.
Disqus and Intense Debate offer very similar commenting systems. The big difference is that Disqus incorporates a forum into the blog as well. However, Intense Debate’s user profile system seems further along than Disqus. It lets users see who visited their profile, link to other social networks, and a frequent commentor widgets. Both could benefit from inter-operating with each other. Which one is better for blogs is really a decision best left to individual blog owners.
You can try their comment system after the jump…
uncov.com anyone?
Drupal anyone?
Joomla is far better - the only aspect is integrating the components together, this application just seems like Blogger/BlogSpot 2.0
I went to one of the site’s using intense debate and tried it out. It doesn’t work. The comment didn’t post. It also doesn’t look very slick
sorry
I like it… hopefully it gets more adoption from the blogging community.
Ok, so let’s pretend I’m IntenseDebate developer.
“Ok, does it look nice?”
“No Petri, we need more buttons”
*click*
“Added.”
“Petri, more buttons!”
*click*
“Added.”
“Petri, MORE!!!”
*click click click*
“Seven more buttons. Good enough?”
“Yes, good enough”.
Ew, mental image.
how much attention the TechStars and Y-Combinator projects get, for being relatively small in scope and execution. no?
Amazing, yeah.
I can only remember one great project of YCombinator, and it is Reddit. I doubt there are any others out there, am I wrong?
There are over 110 million blogs being tracked on Technorati… As you may know, the majority of blogs have a comment system. So, any company attacking this market is looking at a maximum potential target audience of 110,000,000… That’s far from being “small in scope”, no?
@Robert.
But well, that’s the same as telling that, say, browser toolbar or “FREE!!!” smilies are attacking market of a billion Internet users, because every Internet user can install it.
@Robert Dewey,
So you’ve conquered 110 million blogs (90% of which are of no consequence), then what? How do you make money to eat something besides Top Ramen?
@Petri
Exactly. If you’re a toolbar company that can uniformly meet the needs of every internet user out there, then that’s a huge market.
Likewise, if you can sell your smilies to every internet user, then that’s also a huge market.
In this case, we have a comment system superior to most others that could uniformly fit in with most blogger’s existing solution.
Again, how is that “small in scope”?
@Alaska;
I’m not sure, as it’s not my company… But, things that you COULD do include a donation button (remember, you have 110 million users), or start an advertising network through the comments, sharing the revenue with bloggers.
Again, under the assumption that you have 110 million users… doing either of those at this point would contaminate the product IMO, much like those cheesy services that are private-beta, yet plastered with Google ads.
Ok, so maybe it’s not so small after all. But how’s that a business? I fail to see much profit here, just as with every single dot-com of late ‘99 or early ‘00.
pretty lame it asks for email address verification before I can start posting. Email address validation is so meaningless now days.
Also is it just me or is intense debate a REALLY bad name?
It also looks a bit ugly by default.
How is it that they happen to do a relaunch on the exact same day as Disqus? Seems like they were trying to get in on the limelight. Intense Debate does seem lame relatively, but I guess all competition is good
Petri: in response to your comment #8 above, here’s a name for ya: Justin.TV.
Fred:
Oh, I see. Justin is also YCombinatored? Hm…
@Robert Dewey
That’s a horrible future whereby blog comments are now a haven for text links. And donation boxes. Wow, I remember those things being plastered on popular forums, begging for change. Save for the 4chan and the SomethingAwful fundraisers, I’ve rarely seen anyone of them able to get traction.
I don’t think this is as exciting. They’re just replicating Reddit for blogs.
@Alaska;
Well, I didn’t mean donation boxes IN the comments
Those were just ideas that I spit out in
@Alaska;
Well, I didn’t mean donation boxes IN the comments; more along the lines of at the service… the fact that they are “open” in terms of data portability is what is really appealing, and if they play the “we are an open alternative” model, I could see donations being a source of sustainment.
Those were just ideas that I spit out in less than 10 seconds, as this really isn’t my area of expertise in terms of market research, business models, etc..
I would be interested in hearing your ideal business model for such a service, Alasksa.
**original comment was chopped**
I don’t mind it. Some criticism, although I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it:
1) >Post Anonymously | Log In And PostPosting Anonymously.
I don’t mind it. Some criticism, although I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it:
1) “Post Anonymously | Log In And Post”
Why must it look like a set of tabs? Why not just have a name followed by an optional password field? I felt anxious when I first eyed the form region.
2) “Posting Anonymously.”
Perhaps thats obvious and just adds clutter. And I’m not actually posting anonymously if I enter my real name.
3) To the left of “Posting Anonymously.” is a blank user display image. Distracting and unnecessary. I just want to post.
4) When I posted a comment, I was wondering if my comment would appear, and when it would appear. Perhaps some kind of message would help.
5) When I clicked on “Why?”, the msg box did not appear correctly in Firefox.
6) Let the mouse pointer do what it wants please. I want to copy some text and I want to know when to click.
@ exapted
Those are very good pointers, and things we’re looking to improve in future versions of Intense Debate. Thanks for pointing them out.
We want Intense Debate to be what our users want it to be, therefore we value all criticism very highly. If anyone else has suggestions on how we could improve, feel free to email me at isaac (at) intensedebate (.) com. Thanks!
classy… trolling every site that covered disqus. pretty shoddy job copying features, too.
i’m picking up on some small penis syndrome - somebody was like “wait so all intensedebate does is let you subscribe to people’s blog comments?” and josh was all like “shit they’re onto us…quick add a shitload of buttons and useless features so we seem more like a company and less like something that can be added to wordpress in 2 days”
ahhh-ha, busted.
Pretty cool. I signed up and already add the script to one of my blogs - http://www.vwjettatdi.ca
Honestly, Disqus looks more classy. Shorter domain name, easier to remember and more precise meaning. I really don’t get the point about “richer functionality”. Aren’t we living in times when “less is more”?
Just wait a few weeks for the private beta launch of another service (to remain unnamed) and this will be old news.
Finally, a startup that’s not called something like Qibo or Woozu.
Cute!
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The best part is the ‘beta-ish’ tag… it’s seldom that a logo can make me laugh, kudos!
Tried a couple of times to comment with Intense Debate/OpenID, to no avail…
I wana try instant-debate, but still waiting for the confirmation email. I’m starting to loose patience…
Still cant get the Debate/OpenID to work.
Anyone having issues email me and we’ll sort them out.
josh@intensedebate.com
If anyone is having an issue just let me know and we’ll sort them out. Apologies, we are still “beta-ish”
josh@intensedebate.com
Intensedebate just plain sucks.
Its buggy, refuses to load most times, constantly crashes browsers and really slows down page loads.
My visitors complained that they were unable to post comments many times when I installeded ‘ID’ in my blog so I decided to revert to the built-in system.