Bwana.org » intensedebate

Intense Debate Now a Part of Automattic

Bwana — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:08:11 +0000

The commenting software, Intense Debate, was acquired by Automattic today according an announcement on their blog. I’ve went on record to state my support for Intense Debate and their benefits over their main competitor, Disqus. Recently, I’ve been beta testing some of their newer features and I can definitely see the reasoning behind the acquisition. There are some exciting features coming!

Intense Debate has temporarily went back into private beta (which won’t affect current users), so you’ll need to wait a bit to create a new account. If you’re not familiar with Automattic, they are the parent company of great blogging software such as WordPress, Akismet, and Gravatar. Intense Debate adds a great commenting system to the fold and I can’t wait to see what becomes of the merged technologies.

Congratulations Intense Debate, I’m happy for you guys and will continue to show my support.

Feedly’s FriendFeed Aggregation [Do Want]

Bwana — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:30:01 +0000

One thing Feedly has nailed, is aggregation of FriendFeed conversations surrounding a blog post. Feedly surfs the FriendFeed waves and finds all relevant conversations surrounding a particular post. This gives you a great summary of what the FriendFeed community is talking about regarding that post. It also allows you to easily contribute to the FriendFeed thread(s) right from Feedly.

I love this feature. I love it so much, I want it on my blog. While Intense Debate and Glenn Slaven have done great work with pulling in FriendFeed comments to WordPress, I want what Feedly has. I want it all, I want it now. I would love it if someone were to develop this as a plugin for WordPress. If you could comb all of FriendFeed for every instance of your blog post and embed all those mini-conversations on your blog, it would be awesome, awesome to the max. So please, if you’re a WordPress plugin developer (Glenn, AHEM!), or a blog commenting system (Intense Debate, Disqus AHEM!!), I ask that you observe what Feedly is doing with FriendFeed conversations and reproduce that on blogs. You would make me one happy blogger.

Intense Debate Is the Easy Choice

Bwana — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:24:40 +0000

A while ago, I wrote about my difficult decision between choosing from the commenting systems, Disqus and Intense Debate. Much has changed since that post, including Disqus’s support of video comments and now, Intense Debate’s support of FriendFeed. At this moment, the only benefit I see of using Disqus over Intense Debate is its support of video comments. This makes the decision a lot easier for me. Now that Intense Debate supports FriendFeed, it becomes a no-brainer:

The ability to import and export existing comments with ease propels Intense Debate as the clear winner.

Both Disqus and Intense Debate now support FriendFeed, both have great moderation options, both have a decent reputation system. The huge difference here is that my existing data is safe AND my future data is easily accessible. I realize Disqus has data portability options available, but Intense Debate’s are much simpler in my mind. I also realize, with Disqus, you can keep your existing comments on your blog and only use Disqus for new posts. (Intense Debate has the same option) While this workaround may be sufficient for some, I’m not a big fan of keeping two separate commenting systems on the same blog. Intense Debate’s solution is more elegant, seamless, and easier for the user to use and maintain.

I commend the folks over at Intense Debate and FriendFeed for making this happen, and I’m glad I was patient with Intense Debate. I’m quite confident I’ve made the right choice. Take a look at the Intense Debate comments on FriendFeed.

Intense Debate or Disqus? I’m torn.

Bwana — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:17:28 +0000

I can’t decide.

I’ve used and loved Disqus in the past, but felt the data portability options were limited. I loved the data portability options of Intense Debate, but found it lacked support with FriendFeed. Recently, I went on record as to my reasons for liking Intense Debate. One of those reasons included their willingness to support Seesmic video comments. Today, Disqus has added Seesmic Video comments to their system. I’m left with the following:

Intense Debate allows me to import/export comments to and from my WordPress blog with relative ease. That is good feeling to have.

Disqus integrates with FriendFeed very well and has gained great popularity due to Dave Winer and Robert Scoble‘s seal of approval. Their (Disqus) community is very bullish about the platform.

So part of me wants Disqus for the Seesmic/FriendFeed support while the other part likes the data portability options (the ease of it) of Intense Debate. Now here’s another thing: This post may draw people from the Disqus AND the Intense Debate communities. Since I currently have Intense Debate installed, I doubt many Disqus users will bother commenting. That’s a whole ‘nother bag of apples.

I really miss video comments and was willing to move to Intense Debate because they expressed interest while I heard nothing from Disqus. Now, Disqus has launched support, and I’m hearing nothing from Intense Debate.

Torn.

Why I Like Intense Debate

Bwana — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:08:26 +0000

Intense Debate aims to improve comments on your blog. I’ll make this short and sweet:

It imports all my old WordPress comments
It allows me to easily export my comments from Intense Debate if I choose to move my data
And this:

Nuff said.

I’m going to try it out for a week or so and see how it goes. I’ll miss Seesmic comments but I haven’t received a video comment in a while so I doubt it will affect anything.