New IntenseDebate Features: Reply-By-Email, Twitter, Me.dium, & Orkut Integration
It’s Wednesday and here at Intense Debate that means we rolled out some new features in last night’s release. As always, kudos to everyone here for cranking out these sweet features.
Reply-By-Email
We’re extremely pleased with the beta features we released last week. Many thanks to our beta testers for their excellent feedback! Thanks to their help we’ve rolled out Reply-By-Email. Now blog owners will be able to reply to comments made on their blogs, approve friend requests and moderate comments all via email.
While this feature can be used with all email clients, you may have to include !END at the end of your reply. If you use any of the following mail clients you do not need to enter !END at the end of your message: Outlook, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail/Windows Live, Yahoo!, Blackberry, iPhone, Apple Mail, Windows Mobile. Again, for all other email clients you must include !END at the end of your reply. Please let us know which mail clients you use and we’ll work on integrating them. Also, please do not remove any of the original message text from your reply. If you’re mail client is in a language other than English, this feature might not work. Our apologies.
Twitter Integration
We’re really excited about this feature. Now when you comment using IntenseDebate, you can opt to have a notification sent via Twitter. You have full control over the wording of your notifications. For instance, my notifications read, “Commented using IntenseDebate on %POST% / %BLOG% %TINYURL%” But again, you can have the text be whatever you want. Pretty nifty.
To enable this feature, please visit your edit profile page. On the right side of the page you’ll find a list of other networks where you can enter your profile URL’s for members of the IntenseDebate community to check out. Below this you’ll find our Twitter section (screenshot below). To enable Twitter integration, enter your Twitter profile URL and select “tweet about my new comments.” Of course, you may want to use caution with this feature for your followers’ sake.
Me.dium & Orkut Integration
Again you’ve requested it, so you’ve got it! You can now include your Me.dium and orkut profile information in your IntenseDebate profile. Here’s a bit about each if you’re not familiar with these services. Be sure to check them out!
orkut – “orkut’s social network can help you maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages, and establish new ones by reaching out to people you’ve never met before.”
Me.dium – “Me.dium is an add-on for your web browser that allows you to surf, chat and experience the web with your friends in real-time. Bump into friends and interact with the crowds just like you would in the real world.”
We’ve got a ton of awesome features coming down the line that are going to blow your mind. So stay tuned and keep commenting!
Cheers,
Michael
Posted by Michael Koenig in features
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IntenseDebate - Official Blog 
[…] week we released our Twitter integration – an option in your IntenseDebate profile that sends a notification via Twitter when you post a new […]
Sounds great!
sounds cool. im new to this stuff but it sounds fun
Allow the U.A.W. & it's membership to use the 30 billion Owed to V.E.B.A., for the purchase of the "Big-3". Operate as an employee owned co.. Participate in profit-sharing, based on production & sales. Wages & benefits made more competetive in today's market. Please expand on this thought !
I think thie comment system is awesome. hope to install to my web site.
just installed on my website
http://www.self-pleasureforwomen.com/
And it looks real good I think it will encourage comments
thats good…..i already join in
huum nice one
I'm going to give it a try. I have tried Twitter tools on my WP blog and can't get it to work.
Thanks for the new updates! Hey.. I like how clicking on comments here just rolls out the comment box, no need for a page reload. How'd you manage that? Is that possible on wordpress? 🙂
Me.dium and intense debate together at last 🙂 Make sure you friend jenniferlauren, gfigg and pjn to take me.dium for a test drive.
Hey Cynthia. This is one of the comment layout settings for your blog. To change this, select the tab that shares the same name as your blog (once your singned into IntenseDebate.com), and select the "Comment Layout" subn-tab. Check out the comment layout section. There are three options – we're using the drop-out option on this blog. Hope this helps.
Michael,
You might be able to better inform me about cross-listing. How do you know when to cross-post? I post on a few different blogs, tend to be on diiferent issues. But, on a diary page I had simple comments, and enclosed the URL to my blog, that I just started a few days ago, since I had additional comments on the issue. I was told this is not proper edicate. I just started blogging a couple weeks ago so I'm not up on internet edicate. Does the 912 project allow you to cross-post?
I would say it is important to implement video comments. While I understand your concerns surrounding indexing, I don't think we should let that prohibit us from implementing the feature. In my travels around the internet, one workaround that would help alleviate the issue around indexing is to accompany a video comment with a short text description. For example, if I were to respond to a post regarding Twitter's lack of uptime, I could produce a video comment and accompany it with the text "It's not all Twitter's fault" and that would aid in indexing.
Granted, it doesn't convey the entire comment, it does give a sense of what the comment is about and will give readers an incentive to click and also provide some context around indexing. This shouldn't be hard to implement because just about every video producing application already asks the user for a short descriptive text. I believe text and video should compliment each other, not replace one another.
My $0.02.
Yep – stoked about it Ginevra. It will be a cool way for commenters to share and discover each other's blogs together.
Great!! Orkut option!!! I got it!!!!!
And to address the indexing issue as bwana did, just take a look at YouTube. They're now owned by the world's best company at indexing information–Google.
Clearly they've come up with ways to index video very well, as a result of how well the search for videos works on their site.
Short description sentences, keywords, tags, etc. all are ways to help index the video for searching.
Yep! it's on it's way. stay tuned….
Really, some HTML should be supported in comments.
!END – I wish I would have read this last week! That would have solved my windows mobile reply by email problem for sure. Sometimes when replying I get an error that there was no message.
When you hover over any person's name (who commented), it takes a long time for them to fire up an AJAX query to their server and get the data returned, I mostly get a dialog saying "Stop Running Script?" !!
This would be very very cool! +1 on FriendFeed feature request!
I'd just like to say, I'm using Pegasus Mail, and the reply-by-email works without the !END too. As long as my reply is ABOVE all the quoted stuff, it works. However it doesn't work if I put my reply BELOW the quoted items.
Any plans to integrate Intense Debate into FriendFeed?
Great to see ID delivering on features at a crucial time. With Disqus and ID being featured on Leo Laporte's Net @ Night podcast these past two weeks, I imagine there is an uptick in new users happening on both services now.
New features like Twitter integration is a unique and useful enough to make the difference. I'm curious if ID is planning on rolling out a video feature similar to how Disqus did with Seesmic.
Really? What browser and version are you using? Can you please provide me with a specific link and example of where you encountered this? Thanks!
This should be all set now. Thanks again for pointing it out.
Thanks for the awesome responses. Your feedback is excellent! I can't argue with the fact that there are limitations with self-expression in written comments. When it comes to conveying emotion, being able to see and hear the commenter is it. No question about that.
Tagging posts and providing descriptions seems like it could solve the indexing issue or at least provide a decent alternative. Your insights are definitely spot on and we will absolutely take all of this into heavy consideration.
My next question is about spam – keyword filters and spam blockers won't be sufficient. Now I'm just thinking while I type, but it seems that inflammatory comments could be a serious problem. Of course blog owners would be able to delete comments just as they can now, but the damage could already be done by the time they get around to it. We could always give publishers the option of holding all video comments for moderation, but this would slow down the debate and take it out of real-time.
What do you think? Love your input here.
Thanks for the feedback Ian. Video commenting is something we've been exploring for some time now. Is this something you're interested in?
One of our many goals is to continue to take steps towards indexing comments so that they’re picked up by search engines. Being that video comments are what they are, there would be no way to index them (at least that I can think of). IMO this seems to be a serious drawback to implementing video comments. What do you think?
Well, I am using IE7, have broadband connection (4mbps+), have faced this on this page only!
Wow, this looks great. I may try this in my blog too.
HTML support in comments is on our feature list and is coming up. Stay tuned… Love to hear your thoughts for other features.
Michael,
Well I was curious what your response would be, because although Disqus implemented this feature with much fanfare, I wasn't ever convinced it was a feature anyone was clamoring for…
However, I decided to look into it a bit more now, and after doing some reading, I really believe this could be an essential feature to include in ID's feature set.
As Robert Scoble put it "This is yet another piece in connecting us all together in the real time system I call “the World Wide Talk Show." ( http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/14/seesmic-disqus-a…) And when you think about it, commenting is all … tags. Just something to look into.
Fellas, I really appreciate your input and am bringing it to the table. I'll keep you posted as we talk this over at HQ.
Again, I would point to the pioneers of video sharing–YouTube. While I don't know all the methods that go into their spam filtering, I would suggest looking into it. Learn from the best!
On another note, even YouTube gets its fair share of inflammatory posts. Something that should be differentiated from SPAM. SPAM is generally not directed at any one person, or inflammatory. But I digress.
Even YouTube has videos posted that must be taken down, but thats the nature of the beast. If you want community to grow, you can't inhabit it from doing so simply because a minority will do harmful things. Giving moderation tools is really the best you can do. It's up to the publishers to cultivate a community that is responsible in it's actions.
Lastly, an idea just came to me. ID has a wonderful reputation system built in to rate commentors…why not let video posts be a privilege that only a certain level of Reputation allows? Take it even one step further and let publishers set what minimum Rep level allows it too.
Note: For some strange reason whenever I hit reply its preloading the text box with my last comment's text. Firefox 3.0, Windows Vista x64
Yeah, that would be a great feature!
Sweet Duane. Glad you're digging those features. More cool stuff to come…
Glad to see the Twitter add. Just added Intense Debate to my MyBlogLog profile also. Thanks.
Hello Pirates, this comment form is really good!!!
Cool feature. Good buy by Automattic!
I'm happy to be here.I just added intense debate to mybloglog and it cool.Thanks.I still search to see the full stuff arrownd.
[…] Yet one of the most progressive features in IntenseDebate’s deep feature set is the ability to notify Twitter when you’ve made a comment. Not only does this feature help the commenter showcase what […]
Neat. Let me just test my 1st comment and tweet.
How exactly does the reply by email works?
I've tried to reply that way, but the reply never shows up on the site.
Does it takes some times to show on the site?
Do I have to be loged in? I dont get it
I disagree with the above remark. I think in these tough economic times we need to rethink our old ways of thinking. For more information visit http://www.alaskapersonalinjurylawyer.net
Sorry for the delay. Please try adding !END to the end of your response. Make sure that you leave the subject line and original message intact.
I disagree with the above remark. I think in these tough economic times we need to rethink our old ways of thinking. For more information visit http://www.alaskapersonalinjurylawyer.net
We recently encountered an issue with our reply-by-email feature. We have since fixed it. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please leave the original email and subject line intact. Type your reply at the top of the email just as you would with any other email. Please try adding !END at the end of your reply to ensure that it's parsed correctly. So it would be:
Approve!END
Which would approve a comment awaiting moderation.
Hi Michael,
I am really happy about your answer, it worked very well!
But, there is another problem: in Brazil we have many words that uses accent / marks (like acute accent). When I answer using these words, in the replies appear a strange character.
Thanks for your attention and sorry by the english.!END
2010/1/30 IntenseDebate Notifications <notifications@intensedebatemail.com>
Michael Koenig replied to your comment on New IntenseDebate Features: Reply-By-Email, Twitter, Me.dium, & Orkut Integration / IntenseDebate Blog:
We recently encountered an issue with our reply-by-email feature. We have since fixed it. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please leave the original email and subject line intact. Type your reply at the top of the email just as you would with any other email. Please try adding !END at the end of your reply to ensure that it's parsed correctly. So it would be:
Approve