Yes! It was announced yesterday that IntenseDebate was being acquired by WordPress’ parent company Automattic.
IntenseDebate offers a system that makes blog commenting more social and discussion oriented with features like comment threading, reply by email, comment voting and twitter notifications to name a few.
Matt Mullenweg of Automattic noted that the service would remain independent of WordPress as a whole but that users could expect integration into Wordpress, WordPress.com and Gravatar moving forward. He also mentioned one of the features that can be expected in WordPress 2.7 is comment threading which should be a welcome addition to many.
From an editorial point of view I feel this is an excellent move by Automattic. User commenting has been a fairly stale aspect to the WordPress platform for quite some time and this acquisition allows the team to have total control over what has become an emerging niche among WordPress related services. One such service that will probably take the biggest hit is Disqus which has seen rapid growth offering similar enhanced commenting services via plugin. All in all the net result should be an enhanced user experience for WordPress blogs.
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