Jon Fox

Along with the change in the calendar year a lot is changing both for me personally and for Intense Debate. We’ve had a team member leave, which has been an adjustment for all of us here at Intense Debate, but all things considered I think the transition is happening rather smoothly. We’ve also got a completely new server infrastructure we started running on around the end of the year. It was a huge pain, but things have been running much smoother since and it was a much needed upgrade. Definitely worth the time and effort (although that’s much easier to say now that it’s all done). And of course we’ve got a lot of changes ahead in the coming weeks. Expect several announcements from our team about the upcoming changes.

This is gonna be a big year.

Thought I’d dust off the old elf outfit and spread a little holiday cheer…

Sadly the holiday cheer is no more 🙁

It often surprises me just how powerful a pair of “fresh eyes” can be. One prime example of this is a question one of our users asked me today during an IM conversation. Notice in the comments below (if there are any) that users can add in their profile information for Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Users can add this to their profile information at IntenseDebate.com. His question was this: why not include the start of the url for each of the services since that will be the same for every user?

Seems simple enough, right? Fairly obvious? Yet the truth is my team and I might never have thought of this helpful (though small) change that can simplify this process for all of our future users. Granted this won’t be a life changing moment for anyone, but this is just one example of a greater underlying principle.

The point is this: never underestimate the power of fresh eyes. Always be sure you’re taking feedback and asking for advice from someone new to the product/service. Their perspective will be completely different and will often have simple suggestions that make all the difference in usability.

Well, we finally opened up the beta to everyone today. It’s been a crazy week leading up to this and an even crazier day today, but all in all I’d say things went pretty well.

There have been a few minor bugs here and there, but overall things held up pretty well. We had several major reviews and a huge spike in traffic, and all things considered I was really happy with how well everything managed to hold up.

While I’m glad to get to this point, and there is certainly a fair amount of relief to finally be at this point, it’s really just a new beginning. We’ll keep cranking away to continue to make Intense Debate even better, and now we’ll have an endless flow of feedback from all of our new users to help shape the product.

So if you have a blog (or if you’d be willing to set one up) I’d encourage you to check us out at IntenseDebate.com….it’s a whole new way to comment.

I had forgotten how much I love Pandora.  I was reminded of it during a recent visit with Seth Levine and I pretty much haven’t turned it off since. To me I like it because it’s so amazingly simple. I’m not very good at remembering names of songs or artists (or anything for that matter), and I find it so convenient to be able to just find the name of an artist or two that I’m into right now and create an entire radio station (that I can listen to all day) with a variety of music that has similar characteristics to the artists I entered. I don’t have to create a complicated playlist and I don’t have to remember the name of all the artists and songs I want to listen to. Instead I just pop in one or two artists and have music to listen to all day.

I spend a lot of time at my computer and I had kind of phased out listening to music while working because I found it too much effort to keep up the variety to last me all day. I had replaced it with podcasts instead because it was just easier for me to find fresh content that way. However the simplicity of Pandora has reinvigorated my music listening by making it so easy to get fresh, new music (that I actually like). I’m certainly not going to eliminate podcasts from my daily work habits, but music is definitely working its way back in thanks to Pandora.

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Tonight I was doing what I always do…working on Intense Debate, when to my dismay all of the sudden my internet went out. Now I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how horrible it is when the internet goes out for the developer of a web startup…so needless to say I wasn’t happy. I went through my usual checklist of renewing my ip, restarting the router, restarting the modem and the router, etc, but all to no avail. I noticed that my router wasn’t even getting a proper IP address…so the problem was definitely not on my end. I have cable, so I decided to check my tv and see if it was still getting cable properly. And yes it was….so I get on the phone with Comcast to see why one works, but the not the other.

And so the process began…”Press 1 for English”, I press one. “Press 1 for new service, press 2 for all other inquiries”, I press 2. And then the “pretty” music begins…”Your call is important to us, please stay on the line”….*more music*….”All our service representatives are currently busy, please stay on the line”…and everytime the music pauses I’m hoping…praying that it is a service rep coming to assist me. But…it’s always that stupid recording “All our service representatives are currently busy, please stay on the line”…

Then, when I had all but given up hope someone finally answered! “How can I assist you?” Finally! I’m saved! My internet is saved! I said, “I’m having problems with my internet”. Then, before I knew what had happened I’d been transferred to another recording! Nooooooo!!! This one told me things like “if your lights are off make sure the modem is plugged in. If it is, try another outlet”….I’m thinking, “I waited for this? I already knew/tried all of this!”…then, after a few minutes of this less than helpful message I heard, “If you’re still having problems please stay on the line.” What?!?!

So now I’m back to the “pretty” music…oh joy. Again with the “All our service representatives are currently busy, please stay on the line”, but this time they mixed it up a little…adding in things like “For answers to frequent questions visit us on the web”, or “Chat with us online at…”. Oh geez, why didn’t I think of doing that before! Oh yeah…my internet doesn’t work.

So I waited, and I waited, and I waited….and then all the sudden I heard my Gmail Notifier tell me I have new mail. Wait…I have new mail? How does it know I have new mail…could it be? Is it possible? My hope started to build and….YES!!! The internet has returned! Finally! Then I realized I was still on the line…

To recap, I ended up spending an hour of my time on the phone with these guys…all but about 15 seconds of which was with various recordings and I still never got a sole to tell me what the problem was. Let’s just hope my internet holds out….

Note: So…it didn’t hold out. In the time it took me to write this blog post my internet died again…*sigh*. If you’re reading this then my internet did come back at some point (as that is how I published this), but really…how hard can it be to keep my internet afloat? Are they just toying with me because I hung up?

I’m happy to announce that we finally launched the new theme tonight. If you’ve visited this blog much you’ve probably already seen it, but now you can use the new theme on your own blog.

The new theme is designed to be much cleaner, and simpler…blending better with more blogs. It also has several new features including: an auto-expanding textarea, anonymous commenters can now leave urls, support for multiple blogs in user profiles, optional custom css to further match your specific design, custom comment link text, and the prevention of “double posting” thanks to a new sending graphic.

Please give us feedback on this new release and let us know how we can futher improve your commenting experience.

Well, we’ve had time to recover from our crazy busy end of TechStars and I’ve settled into my new home in Colorado. I’ve kept my head down coding for the last few weeks like crazy trying to crank everything out…and it’s finally going to start paying off very soon. We’ve been working on a lot of new stuff here at Intense Debate and I’m very excited about all of it.

As always though I want to stress the importance of feedback. If you have any suggestions for us feel free to make a comment below or to leave us feedback on our site here.

I’ll be posting news about features as they’re released and we’ll also be posting to the Intense Debate Blog as well. Stay tuned.

Well, after some of the most intense weeks of my life TechStars is finally over. I have to admit that pretty much everything since our TechCrunch post has been a blur. Trying to keep up with everything has been a real challenge and brought out time management skills I haven’t had to use since finals week my senior year of undergrad (ok it wasn’t that long ago, but it sure feels like it’s been forever). And yet somehow I managed to survive…and thrive.

We made it through our investor’s day and wrapped up TechStars. It’s been quite an amazing experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world. The mentoring and connections have been priceless. Although stressful, this past week or so has only furthered my excitement for TechStars from all the random connections that have been sprouting up either directly or indirectly from this program. And although we’re wrapping up and TechStars is over it’s by no means an end. It’s a new phase of the company that I am really looking forward to.

I’ve spent a few days trying to settle in (and furnish) my new apartment, but for better or worse it’s time to get back to the crazy hours of work I kept up during TechStars. I’m way behind on emails, bugs, and pushing stuff out as a result of TechStars wrapping up, Investor Day, and moving, but it’s time to finally get caught up and move forward again. So to any of you reading this that are getting upset that I haven’t responded to your email, fixed the bug you found, or pushed out a feature you’ve requested I want to appologize and let you know that I am finally going to be able to get caught up on all of this.

In short, although I’m sad to see TechStars end it is really just the beginning of a new phase for us here at Intense Debate. A new phase that I’m am very excited about. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff in the works and hopefully you’ll be seeing some of it very soon.

What a crazy day it’s been. Today was our launch into beta-ish (basically beta, but still a few kinks to work out…and since everyone now associates beta with something new and exciting rather than something not fully tested, thanks largely to Google, we are sticking with the “-ish” for a little longer). We’ve been running on little or no sleep for the last few days trying to get everything done in time. It’s finally starting to pay off though as today was a big day for us at Intense Debate.

First, David Cohen was nice enough to write up a great review of us on his blog on Colorado Startups which is also cross-posted to the TechStars Blog. Then, shortly after, Brad Feld wrote up a small post about us as well. And as if this wasn’t enough this same evening were were featured on TechCrunch too (and even on TechCrunch Japan). To add a little more stress, we also presented at the Boulder New Tech Meetup tonight.

These great write ups have introduced us to a lot of potential beta testers and given us tons of feedback on our product. There is definitely no better way to improve your offering than to just put it out there and let people play with it. The feedback of a real user is far more valuable than hours of playing with it yourself. Trust me, I can not emphasize this enough.

All in all we’ve made it through another day, ending much better than we started. All we need to do now is make every day as helpful as this one was…