We’re proud to announce the newest addition to the IntenseDebate crew, Austin Hallock. Austin joins us as a self-taught programmer from Arvada, Colorado. At just 16 years-of-age, Austin has already been involved in several web ventures. So far we’ve all been blown away by his hard work and motivation, and somehow he’s actually ahead of schedule! In fact, some upcoming features are the product of Austin’s coding muscle.

Yeah, he’s a bit of a rockstar prodigy. He just might be the LeBron James of developers…

Glad to have you Austin! Keep on kickin’ ass and takin’ names.

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

One of our most requested features has been FriendFeed integration with IntenseDebate. We’re really pleased to announce that the team over at FriendFeed hooked us up and integrated IntenseDebate. If you’re into FriendFeed and want to pull your IntenseDebate comments into your feed, feel free to add your IntenseDebate account to your list of services and your comments will be aggregated. We look at this as the next step in bringing your comments into the light (check out our past progress here & here)!

Many thanks to the team at FriendFeed for aggregating IntenseDebate comments!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

First off, we want to thank you all for the insightful feedback you contributed on “Who Owns Your Comments?” We want to keep you all in the loop on where we’re at with this. We’re currently compiling all of your contributions and beginning to draft a bill of rights in coordination with other comment platforms. We’ll have something concrete for you shortly.

We’ve also gotten a lot of feedback about our friend system on IntenseDebate. After some deliberation we’ve made the switch from a friends to followers system. Now instead of adding a friend and having to wait for them to approve your request, you will simply be following them.

We look at this as an exciting transition and change of focus of how our community will interact. Instead of a two-way system (where mutual friendship was required), it’s now a one-way system where you can choose to follow someone without them having to follow you in return. If you’re not familiar with this community feature, following someone allows you to get a feed about their latest comments and highlights their activity. As always we’d love to hear your thoughts about this transition.

Thanks again,
The IntenseDebate fellas

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Last week we released our Twitter integration – an option in your IntenseDebate profile that sends a notification via Twitter when you post a new comment using IntenseDebate.

You all sent us some great feedback and we’ve rolled out a couple of enhancements. The main attraction this week is the comment-by-comment tweet option. Instead of having tweets posted for all of your comments, you can choose to tweet on a comment-by-comment basis. This option is available in your IntenseDebate user profile. Just enter in your Twitter credentials and select “Tweet about new comments.” When you post a new comment you’ll have the option to tweet about that comment. Also, now when a notification is sent the tweet source will read “from IntenseDebate” (screenshot below). The feature itself is cool, but it’s the little things that really sweeten the deal.

We’re pretty stoked about this new feature. It’s another step in bringing the comments you make into the light. Your Twitter followers are interested in what you have to say on Twitter, and we’re willing to bet that they’re interested in what else you have to say. Take yesterday for example, we published a post about who owns your comments and we got some great responses to it. We watched as some of our regular users posted comments and then listened as all of the phones in the office received SMS notifications. Needless to say, there were a lot of new faces voicing their opinions in what turned out to be a hell of an intense debate.

Keeping your Twitter followers up to date on what you’re commenting on is just one of the perks. IntenseDebate Twitter notifications also help drive additional traffic to blog posts (both old and new). Jon Fox, our rock star developer, published a post in March about receiving Feedburner and Twitter stats by email, and had pretty much forgotten it existed…until 2 days ago. Somehow David Cohen (founder of TechStars and the man who brought IntenseDebate to life) came across Jon’s post and commented on it. A new comment tweet was sent to David’s Twitter followers, and Jon’s long forgotten post got some fresh life, new comments, and an increase in traffic. Not too shabby.

What I’m getting at is this: IntenseDebate Twitter integration rocks. Stop reading this and go check it out.

Jon has already forgotten about his post. Such is the life of a rock star (developer)…

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

It’s an ongoing conversation within the IntenseDebate community: who owns your comments, blog publishers or commenters? Before we continue, we’d like to acknowledge Hank Williams’ post and Daniel Ha’s post addressing this issue. As this topic extends beyond IntenseDebate, we’ve reached out to the team at Disqus to work on creating a common groundwork for comment ownership across platforms.

Who do you think should own your comments?

Currently the debate is taking place on several IntenseDebate fronts (Get Satisfaction, blogs, emails) and it’s getting time to start making some decisions. Everything we do at IntenseDebate has you in mind, including this decision. We need your input. Of course, we realize that we’re not going to come to a unanimous decision here – “you can’t please all the people all the time” – but the goal is to get close and find a comfortable solution. So let us know your thoughts.

To get the ball rolling we want to propose three options:
1.) Blog Publisher Ownership – Comments made on a blog belong to the blog owner, giving them the ability to edit the comments as they see fit (deleting and editing comments). Blog owners have had this ability with WordPress and other platforms. The only change is that comments are now tied to the commenter in IntenseDebate (which is why there is even a debate here).

2.) Commenter Ownership – Comments cannot be edited by blog publishers. Comments can still be deleted by blog publishers – blog owners must be able to remove spam and inflammatory comments. Commenters can still access their full comment history in their IntenseDebate profiles. Commenters can take their comments with them into platforms other than the blog commented on.

3.) Shared Ownership – This is where it gets complicated and we try to reach a compromise. We’re proposing that blog publishers should have the ability to edit and delete comments as long as the original comment is accessible both on the edited comment and in the commenter’s comment history. If the blog owner edits the comment, then the commenter will receive a notification and have the ability to delete the comment. The commenter will be able to access their full comment history.

We’re sure there are specific stipulations that we’re leaving out that should be included, but we’re trying to keep this post to a reasonable length. Ideally we’d like your opinion on which option you find the most appealing. Then we can start hashing out the specifics. Please vote in the poll below and of course, comment away!

Who owns comments?
( surveys)

Posted by Michael Koenig in News