Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform Wordpress, has acquired IntenseDebate, a blog commenting plugin that works on almost every blogging platform. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. This is the third major acquisition for Automattic after buying Gravatar in 2007 and BuddyPress in early 2008. Automattic promises that IntenseDebate will remain platform agnostic, just like Aksimet, Automattic's comment spam blocker.
It is noteworthy that IntenseDebate's infrastructure goes far beyond being a simple commenting system. The service also includes profiles for commenters and spam control, which should integrate very well with Wordpress' own products.
A few of us here at RWW have used IntenseDebate in the past. Even though we liked the service overall, we found the reply by email function a bit lacking and undependable at times. Also, the plugin does not degrade well when commenting on a mobile device, though this is a typical problem with commenting plugins.
One feature we really like about IntenseDebate is that it supports OpenID, even though we called the actual integration "a bit clumsy" in an earlier review. IntenseDebate also stands out because it allows you to easily switch away from the service whenever you want to. You can just export your data and import it back into your native blogging software's comments database.
IntenseDebate's direct competitors include JS-Kit, SezWho, and Disqus, all of which have a very similar feature set. It will be interesting to see how these companies react to this news, especially because Automattic has also announced that WordPress 2.7 will implement some of IntenseDebate's features, including reply by email and threaded comments. Automattic's WordPress.com already hosts millions of blogs, and integrating IntenseDebate there might just make it the de facto standard for blog comments.
Hat tip to VentureBeat for alerting us to this news.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
Thanks for the write-up. We're extremely excited about joining the Automattic team. You can look forward to more comment goodness in the future!
We will be tightening up all of our features as well as building in more. Our reply by email functionality has come a long way since it’s infancy and makes moderating and replying to comments via email a piece of cake. The debate doesn’t stop when you leave your computer, and reply by email keeps you plugged into the conversation even when you’re on the go. It’s just one of our many features to enhance and encourage the conversation on your blog. For more details about our ever-growing feature set have a look at our features page.
Thanks again,
Michael Koenig
IntenseDebate
Posted by: Michael Koenig | September 23, 2008 12:37 PM
I find that Intense Debate really slows down the loading time of the blogs who implemented it.
Posted by: Merrill | September 23, 2008 12:59 PM
I just followed a link from a blog to IntenseDebate and was looking at the banner and wondering why I didn't remember hearing about the purchase. I glanced back at GoogleReader and found out why.
Posted by: Michael Pate | September 23, 2008 1:06 PM
Um, Automattic never bought bbPress. Matt wrote it to power the WP support forums some years ago. You're probably thinking of BuddyPress (except that wasn't a startup either, just a WordPress MU social networking plugin, and 'acquiring' it was a simple matter of hiring the guy who wrote it).
Posted by: that girl again | September 23, 2008 6:04 PM
Merrill, sorry to hear that you experienced load time delays. I'd love to learn more about the specifics of your experience. I'm not sure if you'll receive this comment so I'll try and track you down somehow. If you do get this please drop me a line and we'll check out what's going on.
Posted by: Michael Koenig | September 23, 2008 9:10 PM