Automattic acquires Intense Debate

An e-mail was waiting for me when I got home, announcing that Automattic has acquired Intense Debate.

For those not familiar with it, Intense Debate is one of those centralised blog comment services, where you replace your own blog's comments with a centralised service. The key advantage of this is that a commenter's activity can be aggregated across blog. The commenter owns her own comments, if you like. Competitor Disqus has been getting more attention, but Automattic's acquisition will push the idea quickly towards the mainstream - and Intense Debate with it. 

Matt Mullenweg has already suggested that they'll be integrating Intense Debate into the Wordpress core, "as appropriate", so we'll rapidly see the concept spreading across the wide world of Wordpress blogging.

It'll be interesting to see how both Disqus - whose primary development has been around Wordpress - and Six Apart - who have been showing more and more of a community focus in their products - respond to this.

But I think this is the first step major step towards making centralised commenting identities the mainstream - and default - way of working.