Today at the TechStars demo day, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced that it has acquired enhanced commenting system IntenseDebate for an undisclosed amount.
WordPress has long been in need of an upgraded commenting system, which has led to a number of replacement and augmented systems in the last year, including Disqus and JS-KIT. WordPress CEO Toni Schneider says that better commenting has been on the blogging platform’s roadmap for some time, and that IntenseDebate’s team and technology made the company a good target for acquisition.
WordPress 2.7 will include some of IntenseDebate’s features by default, including threaded commenting. The service will also introduce a plugin that tightly integrates the rest of IntenseDebate’s other features, like aggregated commenting across multiple blogs.
In a blog post announcing the deal, IntenseDebate says that it will now be re-entering private beta, though the service’s current users will still be able to use it. IntenseDebate will stay a separate service that will be tightly integrated in WordPress, but will also be available for other platforms (Akismet’s spam filtering has been used in a similar manner).
IntenseDebate originally launched to the public last October, sporting features including OpenID support, user profiles, and the ability to track a user’s comments across multiple blogs. Since launch the site has seen impressive growth, reporting at least a 25% increase in users each month.
can we expect some coverage of this demo day?
Yep, we’ll be covering the presenting companies.
This is VERY exciting…glad to see more attention being brought to Boulder…congrats to the ID and Automattic guys!
Yeah, to be known for producing tiny little companies that are acquisition bait. Real inspiring.
Threaded commenting will be a welcomed feature.
It really will be. I’ve done a pretty detailed post on what this means to users and publishers, if anyone’s interested.
http://is.gd/31vg
Ian, as always you rock! Thanks for the awesome post. Consider it dugg!
they need to acquire a security company now because i swear you find more bugs with each wordpress release a bunch of amateurs developers.
That’s unfair. The software is free!
Personally, I think it’s amazing what Wordpress has done over the last couple of years. The guys over at Automatic and the first to admit that not everything is perfect, but with a dedicated team working on the project things can only improve!
Free is no excuse for bad coding or QA practices. I wonder how people would respond if Paul Vixie used that excuse. Wordpress, and Drupal are becoming critical infrastructure in the information distribution platform category.
Free is no excuse for bad coding or QA practices.
EXACTLY
Congratulations to Jon Fox & the team at Intense Debate!
Absolutely great, considering the success of a system like IntenseDebate relies on how many different publishers are using it.
Now with tight integration by default into WordPress, I expect this platform to really begin to grow.
Now if only they would integrate Seesmic for video comments…
That is very exciting. Between Gravatar, BBPress & Intense Debate, WP is really growing in the right direction as a platform.
Congrats! Looks like IntenseDebate will now win over Disqus!
I’m liveblogging the TechStars demo day. Part 1 is here:
http://chrisyeh...ars-part-1.html
I’m glad to hear this. Now hopefully the bugs that caused me to stop using ID will be ironed out and I can go back to it.
They’re ironed out! Come on back, we miss you!
Nice content for us :)
added http://www.oriango.com
Title shoud have Read:
“Pioneers of blogging WordPrezz buys outside blog company to enhance there organizational skills and user experience.”
or “30 million dollar pioneers of blogging struggle to get user engagement right, buys15 thousand dollar startup to correct the issues. ”
DebateLocator.com
bitter much?
Awesome. Will be interesting to see how the integration will go down.
I’m sad that I am not using it already! Give me the install code!
Jeffrey, make sure you drop us a line at IntenseDebate.com and we’ll get you all set as soon as we’re ready to roll!
I just recently started using Disqus for one of my blogs. I really like it, but this article made me re-think a bit.
Congratulations to the boys and girls at Intense Debate. No matter how hard we competed while you where a stand-alone company I am always happy to see a successful exit!
Be Well,
Khris Loux, CEO
JS-Kit
http://js-kit.com
I think the real question is, now that Automattic has claimed its stake with a foray into the “enhanced comment space” -does this spell doom for the other comment services out there -some of which have received sizable investments?
So does Disqus go straight into the deadpool or do we let them bleed it out? :-\
Disqus has lots more momentum and integration with numerous other services. Hardly deadpool material. There are lots of other blog platforms besides wp.
I don’t know Phil. 4.1 million Wordpress.com blogs compared to Disqus’ 30k is a pretty big separation. Intense Debate says they will still be available for other services too.
So, Disqus doesn’t have more momentum or integration after today.
Yes, they do. ID won’t be rolled into WP until the next release, which is scheduled for November; even then, it will not be all the features. Disqus still has much faster loading times from my experience.
I don’t really care either way, but just my experience with the blogs I visit, nothing more.
Phil, we’re moving quickly as are our competitors. We’re planning to release our new WordPress plugin shortly after we’ve made our scaling preparations. I think you’ll be pleased with the new features and high level of custom integration.
In terms of load time, we’re only going to get faster now that we have access to the Automattic team’s expertise in scaling. Work is already underway and improvements are going to be here sooner than you think. Stay tuned…
They’ll sell themselves to some other entity but ID got the big exit.
“big exit”? youre on crack. disqus would have been much more expensive, which is why ID was the target.
Have an axe to grind Phil?
This is really big news for the WordPress team and development community as a whole. According to the WordPress Roadmap, 2.7 is scheduled to come out on or around November 10, 2008, which means that if 2.7 is a pretty significant jump in terms of functionality from 2.6.2, then we may notice a pretty big pick up in site maintenance, or requests for extended commenting functionality from clients. Developing with WordPress is wonderful, but I feel like it changes so frequently that I spend a lot of time worrying about upgrade-proofing themes. And it’s not as if you can sleep on upgrades, as every one seems to be “critical”.
Good move but I like Disqus better.
Finally, a comment system worthy of a Dark Lord’s blog.
Congrats to the whole team! Very exciting!
Ive been very happy with Wordpress Thread Comment, so hopefully this is even better than that.
Thanks for the write-up. We’re extremely excited to join the Automattic team!
As mentioned, IntenseDebate is back in a temporary beta while we ramp up our hardware and get our ducks in a row. When we go live you can expect IntenseDebate to be quicker and offer a more robust feature set. We will continue to improve our service for all blog platforms including Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, Tumblr, and others with more on the way. You can look forward to advanced integrations with other Automattic joints like Gravatar, Akismet, and of course WordPress.
Having the opportunity to reach millions of blogs is a dream! Now is the perfect time to give IntenseDebate a try on your blog or website. You can expect more readers to already have IntenseDebate accounts and you will be able to comment on more blogs than you can imagine. Check out http://intensedebate.com for more info.
Thanks again for helping us spread the word!
Michael Koenig and the Fellas at IntenseDebate
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But I’m really wondering, for how much? :D
Put Disqus in the deadpool. WP probably looked at Disqus as well and realized they would be more expensive since they took in a boatload of funding.
This is great news! I had a chance to speak at length with someone from ID at BlogWorldExpo this weekend, and I was really impressed with their system. I’m guessing that they already knew about the pending deal then, but didn’t want to break the news until yesterday for whatever reason..
How do they make money with wordpress if its free?
WordPress.com has some pay features and Automattic has other properties that make money, they don’t just use WordPress. I believe that some large companies pay to use Akismet for spam filtering.
They also run adsense on wordpress.com and charge companies for hosting and support services.
I’m really going to enjoy the threaded comments in 2.7. I don’t really like adding a lot of plugins to WordPress and that’s one of the reasons that I never used intense debate or any of the other default comments replacements. I’ve really been hurting for threaded comments and this is exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
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So what comment system is Techcrunch using?
This comment system is very great, I love it!
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