Over the past few months we’ve moved back and forth between Intense Debate and the default Wordpress comment system for Imulus Insights. Over this time period I’ve had the chance to get a bit more fully involved with Intense Debate’s foundation, plugin, and structure. This process has for the most part been a massive headache. However, I have to admit that if the service weren’t something we felt had potential we wouldn’t have stuck with it. I’m a fan of admitting when something isn’t a good fit and moving to find a different solution. In this case the benefits seemed worth it so we stuck with it and now Intense Debate is fully integrated and styled into our Wordpress install.

That said. I have some criticisms.

Let’s take a brief look at some of Intense Debate’s HTML:

Okay, I’m not going to spend too long on this as I think the image above illustrates pretty well why working with Intense Debate’s DOM structure is a nightmare. Still, I’ll talk about a few of my major annoyances.

Wrapper, wrapper, wrapper, small-wrapper, smaller-wrapper…

First, Intense Debate is filled to the brim with what seem to be uncessary divs, wrappers, classes, and ID’s. For the life of me I just can’t see why they would need five or six wrappers for specific elements. I just don’t think their users really need that much customization potential. If it was my call I would make the trade off between four wrappers with ID’s and Classes for a simpler system that’s easier to work with. Granted, maybe I can’t ajax in every element on-demand but at least the product would be easier to work with.

Names should be used to make things easier, not harder.

Second, the naming convention they use could be a lot more straight forward. Instead of:

#IDSubscribeToThisWrapper

perhaps stick to something a bit simpler:

#idc-subscribe

Document your DOM.

Third, provide better documentation for your developers. I spent a good chunk of time on the Intense Debate CSS documentaiton page, and while the page is a good start to documentaiton, it by no means has the depth of information that is required to “style” each indvidual element of Intense Debate. If you’re going to add ~200 classes and IDs to customize the applicaiton, at least document it so I can see what I’m working with.

I spent some time on the comment customization layout on the Intense Debate site — and while some of the options are nice, it’s not quite enough. For instance, Intense Debate allows you to link to your own CSS file for style customizations. However, they don’t offer any sort of example CSS file if you want to see how they did things to begin with. This… would be a nice thing to have. Granted I can work with a web inspector to see their styles, but it’d be much nicer to have a tangible CSS file that I could go thourgh.

My wish.

I recognize that some of the above criticisms are being done in order to provide their users with the most amount of customization possible. However, I feel that if customization is the end goal Intense Debate should take a different approach all together. Here’s what I suggest:

Give customers two choices.

1. The ability to use your generated HTML in a widget format (like currently exists)
2. A set of Wordpress template tags that can be used to run functions dynamically without generating the HTML

I would have a substantially reduced amount of criticism is I was able to use the Intense Debate service without having to deal with there ridiculously dirty HTML. Template Tags would allow me to pick and choose what portions of the service I want to incorporate, as well as the ability to style things exactly to my liking with my own HTML stucture. No more !important; declarations, no more individualized Intense Debate only stylesheet, just simple, clean, easy to use Wordpress template tags. This is how the majority of plugins currently work for Wordpress and I see no reason that Intense Debate can’t follow that method. And considering they’ve been purchased by Automattic I’m hoping this is in the works.

End Verdict

I have to admit that the comment traction gained from using Intense Debate is worth the sacrifice of dealing with it. However, I hope they realize they have a long way to go to make their service developer friendly.

It’s called charging people a monthly fee.

Why are so many web-services scared to charge their user base? Especially when the service kicks ass like Facebook or Twitter. TechCrunch is saying that 1 in 5 people on the web have accessed Facebook. I’m sort of thinking that there is something of value there for that many people have an interest. Why then are these companies still looking for a way to make money when the answer is in their face?

Charge us!

Facebook is struggling with ad supported revenue and Twitter is anyone’s guess. Their customers are asking to be charged and would gladly pony-up some cash if it meant a better service.

Facebook and Twitter set bad examples for start-ups by not charging. It creates the impression that all web-services must be ad-supported. This simply isn’t a good approach to building a long term sustainable service. Locally, I try to attend the monthly Boulder / Denver New Tech Meetup, and I’m continually heartbroken by all the startup founders looking for ways to capture VC funding when they already have a fairly nice service to offer. It’s as if everyone is trying to cash in on building the ‘next big thing’ by growing fast and selling to Google.

I fully understand giving a service away in the beginning in order to draw in the users, but have a clear plan to stop the free services and convert to a paid model. The “try before you buy” model isn’t used enough. Facebook could charge for users who’ve been on their services for over 1 year. Twitter could easily charge by volume of Tweets.

I can already see the comments coming in about how charging will diminish the social / community value of these services. Yet, I would be MORE likely to use these services if I was confident they would be here in the future and not sold off to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.

Ok, I know George and Bruce will probably kill me for this, but I just don’t get Twitter. For marketing purposes, I completely understand where it’s beneficial. However, social marketing is only effective if you have an audience. So, why is Twitter working so well?

I know people love to talk about themselves, but frankly I don’t think anyone needs to know what I’m doing every 5 minutes. I guess if I have something to say, I say it to the relevant people. I also personally don’t give a shit what you’re up to. I mean that out of love. I swear. I love to know where my friends are and what they are up to, but I really don’t need a play by play. Knowing you’re at work or out for the night is just fine. I just don’t care that you’re brainstorming for a big project, just beat someone at Halo, or just ran out to the bathroom. Really. Who really needs that information?

I’m all for a personal IM conversation with my friends, but I don’t need the whole world to know. I guess that’s why I don’t update my facebook status. I only write on people’s walls. That may be why the “mini-feed” pisses me off. Sure it invites more conversations, and I know people can view whatever if we’re friends, I just don’t think my friends need to know every freaking thing I do. I’m all for advances in technology, especially in our industry, but isn’t there a point where we’ve lost all personal communication?

I’ll give Twitter some credit for putting like-minded folks together. I think it’s a great system for bouncing ideas off other people or getting help, but do I really need to know that you had a snowy drive into work this morning? If the point of Twitter is to get information from people and share ideas, great, but that’s clearly not what it’s used for, at least not exclusively.

I’m sure the hate mail will come soon from Twitter defenders, but please someone explain why I should Twitterfy my life!!

Now that I have Twitter and Facebook hooked together I seem to be making more updates on a daily basis, and I’ve been using a variety of tools to help me better engage with the Twitterverse. Here are a few of the jewels which I’ve learned to love.

• Qwitter: Tracks which followers have decided to abandon ship and which Tweet pushed them over the edge.
• Twollow: Auto-follow Tweets which contain keywords which you are interested in. You can track up to 5 phrases. For me, I auto-follow those with words like “small business” “entrepreneur” and “interactive agency”. However, I would very much like a frequency setting to help qualify people who Tweet about these topics from those who make passing mention of a phrase.
• FB2Twitter: For those of you who want to keep the World of Facebook separate from Twitter, this is obviously not for you. For those who want to reduce your number of status update locations, this is a dream.
• Twist by Flaptor: A great application for tracking the trends on Twitter. It’s more of a pulse check for various terms, likely not something which is going to be useful on a daily basis.
• Greasemonkey Nested Reply Script: This is a beauty for viewing which replies are in context to which Tweets. You’ll need Greasmonkey and Firefox to make this work. One note however: the nesting is in reverse which feels a bit counter intuitive.
  

I hope you enjoy these nuggets of goodness as much as I do. They have made my Twitter experience very enjoyable.

Oh, and Happy New Year! See you on Twitter @gmorris

A few weeks ago I decided to set up a new service on my personal website to track all the social services that I’m a part of. Basically I wanted a central place where people could go to find out what I was up to, what pictures I was posting, and where I’d been. Now, I know there are services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! that do this on a larger scale but I don’t foresee many of my family members signing up for those just to see what I’m up to.

Enter Sweetcron, a free Wordpress like PHP and MySQL content system specifically built to handle lifestreaming. I heard about Sweetcron from my buddy Ryan and decided to give it a try for my new site. To my excitement it was exactly what I was looking for. Below I’ll cover the installation, interface, and end result of my Sweetcron experience.

Installation

Sweetcron is the easiest content system I’ve set up in quite some time. You download the compressed files and upload them to your server, create a MySQL database, and edit a few lines of a configuration file with the info. Once this is done the script has a built in installer that runs to finish the installation. By the time you’ve gone through this process you’ll have a username and password through which you can login to your Sweetcron administration section.

Interface and Use

Once you’ve logged into the back-end of Sweetcron you’ll see a few pretty basic options. Write: for posting quick notes, items: a list of your imported (published or unpublished) feed items, feeds: a list of the feeds you’re importing, and options: which contains basic account settings. Setting up your feeds to be imported into your lifestream is a piece of cake. Grab RSS from your favorite social networks and add them into your feed list¹.

Adding a Feed

Feed List

Imported Items

Sweetcron will automatically format and grab the necessary items related to the feeds. From there you can select from a few different themes of how you want your information to be displayed. If you’re ambitious you can set up your own theme by using the Sweetcron documentation.

Pulling Results via Cron

As the name suggests Sweetcron is reliant on pulling information from your RSS feeds at a regular interval in order to update your database. To do this Sweetcron works in one of two ways. First, you can use a pseudo method that will have Sweetcron update itself if the last update is older than 30 minutes. This method waits for someone to hit the site and then has that visit trigger the fetch. This may work for people without cron hosting access but I found the normal cron method to work better. To set this up I logged into my hosting administration and had the following cron job run every fifteen minutes:

/usr/bin/curl -s http://your-url.com/cron/link Note that sweetcron uses curl and this program may be located at different locations on different hosting providers, for instance:

curl -s http://your-url.com/cron/link

End Result

The end is a great looking lifestream that stores all of your information into a MySQL database that you host. The benefits are awesome. First, you own look and feel of the information output. Second, you don’t have to rely on a 3rd party service. And last, the whole setup is opensource, free, and easy to set up.

1. If you have issues with a particular feed’s RSS being supported I’d suggest routing it through Feedburner first and then importing it into Sweetcron. I had to do this with Brightkite.