It has been a great week here at Intense Debate. We launched our product into an open beta on Tuesday morning with great coverage:

TechCrunch

Read/Write Web

Webware

Among others….

Our launch accomplished many goals for us. We continue to show that we truly care about publishers and commenters alike through our support for OpenID and data migration. Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read/Write Web had a great take on this aspect:

“The single most important thing about Intense Debate is its data export options. If you are using the service in WordPress or Blogger (more platforms to be supported later) and you decide you want to stop using Intense Debate, you can export your comments for import into your native blogging software’s comments database.This is the kind of option that makes all the difference in user adoption – I will let value from my work accumulate in your service if I know I can get it back out again if I so chose. Thank you Intese Debate! I ask every web app I profile about data export and the vast majority just tell me “oh, we’re working on that.”

While not perfect, our importers and exporters still offer an exceptional service to publishers. We find that releasing our solutions quickly enables us to improve even faster.  Why spend all our time perfecting a feature before we even know if it’s in an implementation that our users want?  We believe in letting our users shape our products instead.  We’ve already gotten tons of great feedback (and even help) from our users in regard to the importers and exporters. Thanks to all who have participated (and a special thanks to Coyotesqrl for all his time and effort).
We have set the standard and now others must rise to our level of openness. This is great for all publishers. At Intense Debate, we work very hard to find out what our publishers want and take extra care to execute upon those wants. In the end, everyone benefits.

We’ll keep leading the way, stay tuned. As always, feedback is very welcome!

Posted by Isaac Keyet in News