Automattic (Wordpress) Has Acquired IntenseDebate’s Enhanced Comment System | Hacker News Reader

Automattic (Wordpress) Has Acquired IntenseDebate’s Enhanced Comment System

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25 pointscalvin31 comments

I am using Disqus right now on my blog, it'll be interesting to see what WP does with this. The bad news for Disqus is the just added a feature to their plugin so that comments are now stored both locally as well as on disqus.com - meaning you could drop Disqus and you wouldn't lose any comments. If ID does become default on all WP.com blogs, I think it would probably snowball and convince me to go over to ID as well - the whole point of disqus was it was more prevalent on blogs I read, so I figured my readers would be more likely to have disqus accounts.

Of course, if you're on HN, you might have both =P

The bad news for Disqus is the just added a feature to their plugin so that comments are now stored both locally as well as on disqus.com

This "bad news" was reponsible for a lot of folks switching to Disqus. We were waiting for the feature for our blog, and switched within days of its release. I don't think many serious bloggers are willing to put their community history into the hands of someone without knowing they'll be able to get them back out. So, I don't think this can be viewed as a bad thing, no matter how things shake out--that's just a big batch of users that would have never been Disqus users, if the feature didn't exist.

And Disqus does have the pretty clear market lead...but they will need to keep innovating rapidly to keep growing that lead, particularly in the interim as ID lives in "private beta" while the WordPress folks do whatever it is they're doing with it.

I agree, I am not saying that it was a bad move. I'm saying that it's unfortunate timing for them that a lot of the people who dipped their toes in specifically because they didn't have to commit to Disqus may very well jump ship now.

Basically, they gave their users an option to leave if something better came along. If ID integrates with WP.com and everybody ends up having an ID account, that would probably be the "something better" that would push people over to ID.

anybody have any idea of the acquisition range? was this a sub 1M, 1-3, or 3+?

I'd give about a buck fifty for ID.

What, too high?

Here's IntenseDebate's blog post about it: http://www.intensedebate.com/blog/2008/09/23/automattic-acqu...

A quote from their post for anyone worried that it'll be WordPress exclusive: "You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come!"

Time for Disqus to release a Wordpress competitor, ie. a new open source blogging platform.

WordPress isn't where it is today because it's the best blogging platform. It's become the de facto standard. This might not be the best strategy for Disqus.

"Best" is a relative term, but Wordpress became the de facto standard by being it for the most uses of the word.

Maybe fork the Wordpress project instead.

I would focus on Posterous, Tumblr and other "next generation logging" platforms.

But they don't do blogs... they do comments. And they've expanded their commenting system outside of Wordpress-and that's something I.D. will have a much harder time accomplishing.

This is the second TechStars company to be acquired, right?

Congrats!

3rd.

My intuition is that this means Disqus wins.

"In a blog post announcing the deal, IntenseDebate says that it will now be re-entering private beta, though the service’s current users will still be able to use it."

Disqus will probably have a long time before they are troubled :)

If by troubled you mean on a product quality basis, then yeah. They'll be ahead for years. (They would have been anyway.)

If you mean on an install count basis, then I'd disagree.

don't you have to a)generate revenue or b) have an exit before you win?

You don't have to innovate. I don't think the comment space is even close to done. The issue in my mind is about unified persona online and keeping track of the conversation. My guess is that the good people at ID will focus on their "feature", and never get to the big picture.

edit: i misread your comment, and thought that you meant having an exit means ID can better execute. You're totally right that my comment should be future tense. It's a prediction.

"I firmly believe that most innovation comes from companies that are fighting for their survival and new customers without a safety net." http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/09/third-party-com.html

Why is it not better news for ID?

It's great news for both ID and Automattic.

What if Automattic's plan is to get it into the mainline Wordpress platform? IntenseDebate suddenly gets into lots of sites for free and it becomes a serious uphill struggle for any competitors.

That is certainly possible. I think it glosses over the difficultly in merging two groups together. Disqus is certainly facing lots of uphill

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/disqus.com+intensedebate.co...

I respectfully disagree with your comment. It is like saying Google acquired Omnisio, so the other video annotation sites won. If anything Automatic will integrate the new commenting system and Pooof IntenseDebate will be on n times more blogs.

"My intuition" is Intense debate will see more comments than Disqus. But this does not mean Disqus is in trouble either. I use Disqus sometimes on enabled blogs and it is a great product.

YouTube already won video. Omnisio fits in well as a part of the larger whole. I didn't mean to say competitors should universally celebrate when others get acquired.

I think comments are something special, a developing arena that are the heart of "the conversation".

But my comment is probably naive in that there are so many unknowns that we can't really predict all that much. Intuition is like that though: you get a gut feeling that is the integral over all your experience. I think that matters in personal decision making quite a bit, but clearly isn't respected in an 8 word comment :)

Strongly agree. Converted our blog to Disqus a few days ago. First impression with this post, "shit --- can I convert?". Apparently not; they're private again. Expecting we'll be Intense Debate by WordPress 2.7 release.

When Internet Explorer was released, was your intuition that Netscape won?

Heh. Is it really so unreasonable to assume a competitor being absorbed into a larger organization won't be the most innovative?

A megalodon release is a bit different.

I know, I was just joking. It will clearly set Intense Debate back even further in the quality arena. But it will make them so popular that they don't to be as good.

Still, people do install Firefox, so people will upgrade included components for good reason. Also, Disqus will probably continue their lead on all other platforms.

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