We know we’ve been a little quiet lately – we’ve been hard at work in the lab.  We’ve given the IntenseDebate back-end a huge overhaul, making IntenseDebate more scalable and stable than ever.  Now we’ve set our sights on optimizing your commenting experience – exciting improvements are on the way!

We’re kicking it off with swanky new public profile pages to put the focus on your comments and make it easier to interact with them!  Ooh, and we’re bringing Polaroid pictures back.  😉

So what’s new?

• Comment Search: Find specific comments that you’ve made.
• Full Comment History: Keep track of every single comment you’ve made.
• Overview: Get a quick overview of a fellow commenter with some stats and other profile goodness.
• Description + Latest Tweet: Before you had to choose one…now you can have both.
• Avatar Quilt: See who I’m following.
• Connect Across the Web: Check out my other online properties.

Check out your profile and select “View your profile as others see it”.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

You may have noticed some changes that were rolled out in last night’s release. Three cheers to the team for getting all this out!

HTML Parsing
We’re proud to answer the call and release HTML support in IntenseDebate comments. If you’ve got the urge to add a little self-expression, feel free to add some bold or italic characters. You can also customize your links and add some photos to your comments. You can allow your readers to add images to their comments by enabling this option in your Blog Settings page (login into IntenseDebate.com, select the tab named after your blog followed by the “Settings” sub-tab). The option is located on the right side of the page under the heading “Display Settings.” Image tags are disabled by default. IntenseDebate supports the following HTML tags – <a>, <b>, <i>, <u>, <em>, <p>, <blockquote>, <br>, <strong>, <strike>, <img>.

Popular Blog Posts Widget
We released a new widget that displays the most popular blog posts on your blog (as determined by the number of comments made per post). By displaying this widget on your home page, you’ll be able to breath new life into your past blog posts and drive some fresh traffic their way. This widget is the next step in bringing your content into the light (check out our past progress here & here). This widget can be found on our Add-on’s page along with our other kick-ass widgets (Blog Stats, Recent Comments, My Recent Comments, and Top Commenters).

New Usernames & Profile URL’s
After much deliberation, we’ve decided to take the plunge and update our approach to usernames and profile URL’s. Before we get any further into this, this does not have anything to do with your Display Name – your Display Name has not changed.

Basically we’ve changed your username from an account ID number to a friendlier name. Integrating your IntenseDebate account with other 3rd party services like FriendFeed will be a bit easier now. For those of you that have enabled IntenseDebate’s FriendFeed Comment Retrieval you might recall having to enter your IntenseDebate profile URL that consisted of an ugly user account ID number. Your profile URL is a little prettier and looks a little something like this: http://intensedebate.com/people/michael.

If you are using our IntenseDebate FriendFeed Comment Retrieval, you do not need to update your IntenseDebate profile URL in your FriendFeed account. You’re all set.

Here’s the skinny on the new usernames. Your username has automatically been updated. Please note that any incompatible characters were removed from your username. In addition, numbers from your IntenseDebate account ID may have been added to your username in the event that there were duplicate usernames. Again, this will not affect your IntenseDebate Display Name.

We wanted to let you know about this in case you want to set your username and profile URL to something that fits your style so you can remember it more easily. To update your username please edit your IntenseDebate user profile. We apologize for the inconvenience, but it will be worth it in the long run!

As always, please feel free to drop us a line with any questions or feedback.

Sincerely,
The fellas at IntenseDebate

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

We’ve made some changes to our OpenID 2.0 support. Our OpenID integration has been live for some time now and we’ve had some excellent feedback from our users on how to improve it. So we took it back into the lab for a bit of an overhaul and it came out being much more user friendly. We’re pleased to announce that we have enhanced our OpendID 2.0 integration to support more providers. Thanks again for the great feedback!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

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