Competition

The market for commenting services has become quite competitive lately. Yahoo, for example, just announced an alliance with JS-Kit yesterday, and Facebook also just released a commenting plugin based on Facebook Connect as its first social widget. Other competitors of IntenseDebate are obviously Disqus, which already offers integration with Seesmic, and Google's Friend Connect. None of these, however, offer the extensibility that IntenseDebate's new plugins now offer.

Adding these plugins looks like a smart move on IntenseDebate's part. Not only can it now tap into a pool of talented coders (and possibly hire the best ones in the long run), but - once more plugins become available -  it will also be able to offer its users new features that none of its competitors offer. At the same time, this also allows the IntenseDebate team to focus on its own core product and the stability and speed of its service.

What Would You Add?

If you could write a plugin to extend your favorite commenting platform, which features would you add?

Thousands of services are launched online every year and only a small number of those prove to have as much longevity. Today's new paradigm trailblazer will often be tomorrow's dead-end hassle for its developer. Such is the nature of a rapidly iterating web and such is the fate of Co.mments.

There's a reason why so many people start comment tracking companies - online comments are filled with valuable user data and there's a compelling human element to keeping track of responses to what you've said on blogs. It's not hard to imagine Facebook Connect owning this space within a year, though. We're cheering, none the less, for open standards in the portable identity, data and contacts sphere.

Co.mments hasn't announced any plan for users to export their data. Update: The company just posted instructions on how to export your tracking data.

Project founder Assaf Arkin has a day job as the CTO of open source business process management company Intalio. You can track his other development work at GitHub.

At the time, it wasn't clear when the new version of the IntenseDebate product would be publicly available. But assumptions were that it would remain under wraps until the release of WordPress 2.7. Now, IntenseDebate has returned from its post-acquisition secrecy with some "hi-octane conversational mojo."

But WordPress users haven't been left out. They get even more functionality with the beta of the IntenseDebate plug-in, including inline replies from the WordPress dashboard and enhanced user management features.

But does a plug-in compromise control or ownership of comments? With IntenseDebate, it's been exactly the opposite. IntenseDebate has been very careful to avoid the "walled garden" complaints that have been lobbied against other commenting plug-ins which allowed comments into the system but made it difficult - if not impossible - to get those comments out of the system.

In fact, here at ReadWriteWeb, the comment exporting functionality is one of the many reasons we've been impressed with IntenseDebate since its launch a little over a year ago:

"The single most important thing about Intense Debate is its data export options. If you are using the service in [your blog] and you decide you want to stop using IntenseDebate, you can export your comments for import into your native blogging software's comments database."

Given the quick work of the IntenseDebate development team in scaling the plug-in, it will be interesting to see what features will be unveiled over the coming months. But, even as it currently stands, IntenseDebate offers bloggers and their commenters a much richer commenting experience than what comes "out of of the box" with many blogging platforms.

Users interested in testing IntenseDebate for themselves can visit the installation area to give it a whirl.