Automattic has recently acquired Intense Debate. For those not familiar, Intense Debate takes the blog commenting system to a whole new level. Traditionally, blog commenting is linear, but with Intense Debate, commenting becomes more like a social site. It allows threaded comments, user profiles, comment voting/reputation points (think Digg or Reddit), as well as integration with other social sites. Also, when you make a comment, it can automatically send an update to Twitter or Facebook.

From a strategic perspective, we like technologies that can push the curve of user generated technology – making blogging more authentic.

A lot of these things will likely be folded into the Buddypress project (http://buddypress.org), but we’re hoping they’ll make it into WordPress itself in a future version.

A service like Intense Debate should do great things to improve the entire commenting and blogging experience.

You can read more on Automattic’s acquisition by clicking here.