Company review: Intense Debate - the power of comments

As the Internet grows, so does the power of the user. From personal profiles to product ratings to blogs, the Web provides opportunities to be seen and heard.

One of the most prominent methods in which users speak their virtual voices is through commenting. Commenting gives users power of opinion and personalizes the web browsing experience.

Just ask Intense Debate, a company that truly appreciates the value of a comment. Intense Debate aims to make Internet commenting easier and more organized. By offering several key features that add to the user’s capabilities, Intense Debate aims to not only improve the process, but improve the results, meaning more views for your comments.            

First off, Intense Debate offers a Tracking/ Notification feature, which allows the user to subscribe to his or her friends’ blogs and receive notifications every time there is activity. Furthermore, the notification feature saves the user the time of checking whether someone has responded to one of his or her comments.

To continue with the idea of simplicity, Intense Debate also improves on the structure of comments. The change is that comments are threaded, which allows you to reply directly to a specific comment. The replies to your comment are indented at different levels to make it easier to follow the various conversations.

Intense Debate gives even more power to the people by giving the user even more of a voice. With the Reputation/ Comment Voting feature, users are not limited to writing out their thoughts, they can also approve or disapprove of a comment by voting on it; this vote factors into the commenter’s reputation and gives others an idea of the user’s history. All of this information is part of the Profile feature, which enables users to better connect, find other users, and allow for easy linking to blogs and websites.

And following up on the idea of linking to other sites, the Social Traffic Drive feature allows users to leave, along with their comments, links to their social networks, blogs, and stream of RSS feeds. This is what aims to generate higher traffic to your sites and comments.

But Intense Debate also enables you to better manage your personal blogs. By allowing you to moderate comments form several different sites in one location and by providing you with an overview of activity across all your blogs, Intense Debate is improving almost all aspects of the comment world. 

As user-generated content explodes, it’s not hard to imagine a company like Intense Debate succeeding. By making commenting easier, more organized, and more efficient, Intense Debate should soon be attracting customers that range from common users to well-established companies.