IntenseDebate acquired by Automattic

Today, Automattic announced that they have acquired the centralized commenting service IntenseDebate. Over the course of this year, 3rd party commenting systems have gained quite a bit of momentum for various reasons including having one place where to find all your discussions. With this move now, the centralized system gains even more momentum with virtually all new WordPress installations, hosted or self-installed, getting support for IntenseDebate out of the box according to Matt Mullenweg.

In the end, being able to discuss and follow a discussion an article no matter where you are just makes it much more compelling to get back to that article. And this is exactly what makes services like IntenseDebate or Disqus so interesting to me. Now I just hope that this acquisition won't blow the competition out of the water.

For now according to the announcement on the ID blog that acquisition also means, that ID has moved into private beta mode again, so the real party will probably get started when it moves into public mode again hopefully in the near future. And if all of a sudden all users on WordPress.com end up with their own ID-account, than this party is going to be pretty big ... Let's hope those shiny new Automattic-servers are enough to handle that :-)