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Comment by ivankirigin | Hacker News Reader

My intuition is that this means Disqus wins.

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...

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

"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.

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.

Why is it not better news for ID?

It's great news for both ID and Automattic.

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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