Well, I have been sitting on this news for almost a week now. Intense Debate has been acquired by Automattic.
I am extremely excited for the users, the team (Jon, Isaac, Tom, Michael, Austin, etc), but more importantly the idea. I could not imagine a better suitor for ID and all the possibilities it brings.
Now, as all proud Dads would do, here are some baby pictures from ID before anyone knew about it.
Baby ID
Before Techstars,Intense Debate was a real time debate engine. The idea was to connect two people to debate much in the same way Speeddate.com connects people for dating today.
Think real-time debating with a competition similar to fantasy football and that is what we were. When we expressed the idea to our mentors at Techstars they couldn’t quite wrap themselves around it.
They heard us talking about making conversation better on the internet and tying it into blogs. I am really not sure when the “a-ha moment” happened, but within days the entire debate idea had been scrapped for a much larger challenge: Reshaping the way people comment.
More Baby ID
From the beginning ID focused on the publisher. We challenged ourselves to find ways for keeping people on the publisher’s site longer and making commenting more friendly. When we publicly launched, we were the only system with OpenID compatibility, export via xml, regular comment exporting, and comment importing.
Our interface saw many changes from where it currently stands. We met with countless mentors, friends, and associates honing the look, and feel. Long hours were spent helping any and all users, no matter how small their problem happened to be, or how small our team was.
With the acquisition, ID will expand. You will see it in more places and some of our early visions will come to fruition. I could not be more excited to see ID be used by more people in different places, all knowing that we helped to shape how people comment on the internet. There is no way to quantify the fulfillment I will get from knowing we made a such large impact.
