Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has aquired Intense Debate (ID), a hosted commenting system based in Colorado yesterday.
ID with its cool features like threading, e-mail replies, reputation points, voting, and global profiles will be built directly into future versions of WordPress and Gravatar. It means better management, tracking, organization and easier comment flow with the holy grail of a universal OpenID. And with its comment importers and exporters feature, you are free from the fear of losing your comments database.
I couldn't find out how big is the money for the acquisition. Do you know? With 4,194,374 blogs hosted in WordPress.com alone today, and still counting, along with more than a quarter of a million legitimate comments every day, I bet it is huge money.
Matt promises to keep Intense Debate available as a platform agnostic independent service, a stand-alone service that can be used with WordPress as well as other platforms such as Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, much like Akismet, Automattic's comment spam blocker, and Gravatar services.
Automattic is beginning to integrate ID's features, like reply by email, into WordPress core, but if you want comment threading and other powerful features, you'll have to wait for Crazy Horse (WordPress 2.7) and ID's final release.
In the meantime, IntenseDebate has temporarily moved back into a private beta during their overhaul. This won’t affect the current users, but new installs will require an invite code. If you are a WordPress user and can't wait for the Crazy Horse, you may request an invitation here.
Other similar services that play the same games in the commentsphere are JS-Kit, SezWho, and Disqus.
Here are a comparison of the comment forms among the systems:
Default Wordpress commenting system
Typical Intense Debate commenting system
Typical Disqus commenting system
One thing that distinguishes disqus from ID is its Seesmic video comment integration and capability to reblog comment. But I believe, if it is one of the most wanted features, the guys in ID can easily catch up in no time. For more comparisons, you can check here or there.
With the planned automatic updates feature, Akismet, Gravatar and now Intense Debate, Crazy Horse, you can take a peep one of its current development snapshot here, will be one of the craziest, I mean, coolest, blogging platform in the world.