IntenseDebate would like to congratulate Paul Kedrosky on receiving the Silver Medal for the best financial blog from Pensions & Investments. If you’re not familiar with Paul’s blog, Infectious Greed, be sure to check it out and subscribe. Check out the full story here.

Congrats Paul!

-The Fellas at IntenseDebate

Posted by Michael Koenig

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

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

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

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

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!

Posted by Michael Koenig

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

We’ve released some great features in the past weeks - Lijit integration, Reply-By-Email, Twitter, Me.dium and Orkut integration - and we’ve got more on the way. It seems that people have taken some notice. Yesterday, Jon Fox (co-founder & CTO of IntenseDebate) and Tom Keller (CEO IntenseDebate) joined Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on Net@Night to chat about IntenseDebate. You can check out the podcast here to learn about the roots of IntenseDebate and some of the features to come.

Brad Feld also gave IntenseDebate some much appreciated blog love early this morning (5:44am). Honestly I don’t think he sleeps.

IntenseDebate was also featured in the Mashable post, “Head to Head: 4 Tools For Improving Comments On Your Blog.” Be sure to check that out as well!

Posted by Michael Koenig

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

We’re really excited about our latest beta release that we rolled out last night. The main attraction is Reply By Email - blog owners can now reply to comments made on their blogs, approve or deny friendship requests, and moderate comments all via email. If you’re interested in getting in on this beta, please drop me a line at support@intensedebate.com.

In addition, email and IP addresses will now be included in your new comment posting email notifications for our beta testers. We’ve had numerous requests from our users to be able to privately chat with each other. This is the first step! This new functionality is just a stepping stone of some awesome features to come, so stay tuned and get in on this beta!

Kudos to Jon and Isaac on a job well done!

Posted by Michael Koenig