Up until about a week ago I was using IntenseDebate for my blog & the gReader Comments extension. I’m not a fan of just adding work-load to my free time, so the short-term reason I switched was because I didn’t know how to stop all the Arabic comments coming through ID. My blog is no big deal, obviously, but switching services on the extension caught the attention of the CEO of IntenseDebate (they like it so much they wrote a blog post about it).
Disqus vs. Intense Debate
- Track anonymous comments: not all of my friends that comment like to have accounts
- Community pages: http://reader.disqus.com
- Dashboard simplicity - much easier to manage
- Disqus took the lead in people count & growth (see chart below). An extremely important question to ask yourself when working with startups is “will they be around next year”; based on the growth rate & low market share it will be extremely hard for IntenseDebate to come out on top.
- $500k vs. $15k - this goes with the point above about stability. Publicly, Disqus just received a round of VC money for $500,000 which can keep a startup afloat for quite a while.
- Simple integration: things just seemed to work when working with Disqus and I wasn’t having to encode URLs in funky ways to get them to pass through (with IntenseDebate I was having to change all ‘&’ signs to something like ‘??—??’ and then check for those on the other side to switch back). The Disqus default comment count script could use some work, but with the API all things are possible.
- Integration with FriendFeed - the target market for people leaving comments (that you actually want to read - digg fails) are the big name bloggers & the people they follow, opinion leaders, your friends –> right now that’s all FriendFeed consists of…and the beauty of it is that no matter how big it gets, those people are my only “friends” so that’s all I will ever see. Greater interoperability between FriendFeed & Disqus is one of the bigger goals for my project.
- Great support - Both have this, but Disqus has turnaround in about 12 hours [2] while ID had turnaround in about 24-36 (although I did have a great hour long conference call w/ ID)
Great post and awesome project with gReader. I really appreciate the vote in confidence in Disqus.
Cheers!
dropping a little 'me too' love on this post! Nice work!
BTW love the new RSSlogo over there!
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I honestly didn't do a lot of research when I chose Disqus. Corvida was using it and it look very cool, so I jumped onboard. But (as I blogged about here) with the addition of gReader it seems a no-brainer to me.
At this point, I am starting to think that Google would be stupid not to take a long hard look at Disqus as an almost-complete solution to enable inline commenting in Google Reader. And if they used it by default on those millions of Blogspot blogs... oh wow.
i always regretted the lack of portability in Disqus though. It's a great service but an open system (comments API for all blogs) would be awesome. ID seems to have the edge of Disqus when it comes to data portability at least - e.g. reintegration of D comments into native wordpress if I uninstall. Still, with your recent 'comments connected' gReader feature, no turning back!
I agree with u ............disqus is better than intense debate..........