Three reasons to use IntenseDebate

Fred Wilson has a post today "Three reasons to use Disqus" which prompted this post "Three reasons to use IntenseDebate". For the uninitiated, Disqus and IntenseDebate are blog commenting widgets that manage comments in interesting ways.

This week my  friend Brad Feld asked me to try IntenseDebate. A while ago another friend, Paul Graham of YCombinator fame, asked me to try Disqus. Hmm...what to do?

Funny coincidence - Earlier this week I sent a note to Tom Keller, CEO of IntenseDebate, and asked him for reasons why I should use IntenseDebate. The three reasons he gave me were almost the same three reasons that Fred Wilson cites in his post; 1) Threading comments makes them easier to read, 2) Better user interaction and community, 2) More comments, maybe 5X more comments.

So, the best solution is to test both of them. Starting with this post IntenseDebate will be my commenting engine. Lets run the test for a few weeks, maybe a month and see how it goes.

What are the issues? - I am concerned about several issues.

1. SPAM - TypePad does an excellent job of filtering out spam. There are over 3,000 comments in my spam comment bucket that I never had to deal with. How will Disqus and IntenseDebate deal with spam?
2. Performance - Anything that slows down the performance or page rendering is bad. I checked out the comments on Brad Feld's blog and quite honestly it took too long for the comments to appear on the screen. I thought my Internet connection had failed. Hopefully that was just an anomaly.
3. Usability - Comments are the life blood of a blog. Anything that adversely affects usability is unacceptable. I tested both systems on Fred's blog and Brad's blog. They seemed OK, but the proof is in the test. Let's see what you all think.

So, three reasons to try them, and three reasons to be concerned. Let the comments begin.

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