Intense Debate relaunches
Written on November 15th, 2008 by Graham
As many of you know, there are more or less three services to choose from if you want to enhance your comments. There is SezWho, whom Entrecard is partnered with, there is Disqus which is most popular on tumblr, and then there is IntenseDebate. IntenseDebate was the smallest of the three when it was acquired by Automattic, better known as Wordpress.
Upon Wordpress’s acquisition, it pulled IntenseDebate into a private beta that it has finally emerged from.
The video above explains the features of IntenseDebate. It is fully featured, and as a service in the Automattic portfolio, we all expect big things.
We will be reviewing the service more comprehensively and putting the review right here, on the Entrecard blog.
How to Reconcile the comment services?
We start to run into a problem in the blogosphere. The idea of universal commenter profiles is a great one, but the problem is introduced when three services offer the same thing with segmented user bases. In other words, if 50,000 people are using Disqus, and 50,000 people are using SezWho, and 50,000 people are using IntenseDebate, then we don’t really have universal profiles, we just have segmented services. If you have a SezWho profile, it won’t do any good on a blog that runs Disqus, or if you have an IntenseDebate profile, it won’t do you any good on a blog that runs SezWho.
These companies, eventually will either have to open their data to each other (which I think would be AWESOME), so that your profile for any service is active when commenting with any other service. That’s not going to happen though. My guess is that one will eventually become so huge that it will be pointless to join the others, because the majority of the blogosphere will be using one standard service. Of course, Wordpress think’s this is going to be there own IntenseDebate. But will it?
What do you think will happen with the Big 3 commenter services?
November 15th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
I’m all for such a combined profile system, but I couldn’t say that any one of the ones you listed are better than the others.
Probably the one that can offer the most feature rich, fast loading addon will take over in the end.
NathanKP – Inkweaver Review
November 15th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
I moved one of my sites to use ID to test the features compared to sezwho. ID let’s me moderate and reply to comments through email. That feature alone beats sezwho. I only added sezwho for the entrecard integration and I didn’t see much increase traffic because of it.
November 16th, 2008 at 5:30 am
I only have Sezwho. I stick to it whatever it is. With or without traffic. No more to say.
November 16th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Graham,
Good piece.
there is a further difference between between ID/Disqus and SezWho.
Sezwho does not manage your data (you data stays on your system and so there are no SEO implications etc.) and so can work with all kinds of systems like Wikis, picture sharing sites, other commenting system etc.
This gives us the best chance of building a “universal” profile service.
-Jitendra
November 16th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Definitely a situation to keep an eye on, I don’t currently use any of the three commenting services.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
[...] Intense Debate relaunches [...]
January 3rd, 2009 at 8:47 am
Exactly.
In my opinion, it is hard to predict which of the three will surface.
1) We have IntenseDebate – now backed by Automattic, via WordPress’ popularity, ID can ride and gain as well as convert thousands of users.
2) SeZWho – altho different, in that they add more features to existing “native” comment systems (including forums), they fight by partnering with popular sites like your company – Entrecard.
3) There is Disqus – the first to came out publicly and has been more active with their community. With support from high profile bloggers and blogs as well (and most will not switch to ID or SezWho).
Let’s talk about WordPress only.. so will WordPress bloggers choose SezWho because of Entrecard and other SezWho partners? Or will they drop SezWho in favor of IntenseDebate, and just go back to the traditional Entrecard “farming” and “gaming” methods?
And once again, there is Disqus, which is more supported for WordPress than IntenseDebate (currently), to mention a few.
Finally, we haven’t considered similar services yet… especially that comment-system company that bought Blogger’s most popular comment/trackback system – Haloscan…. JS-Kit. There is still a lot of blogs running on Haloscan, and there are many blogs running on JS-Kit as well.
Let’s watch. Overall, I’m all for openness.
Their objective, especially Disqus and IntenseDebate, is to “defragment” comments. If they continue as it is, then this isn’t a “true” defragmentation.