Boulder based IntenseDebate is joining team Automattic! Check out their blog for the news. Congratulations to their team and welcome to Automattic.

Comments are one of the key features of blogs. Over the past year, several startups (including IntenseDebate, Disqus, SezWho, and JS-Kit) have launched improved commenting systems for blogs (and beyond) and have shown that they can create better comment flow, management, tracking, and organization. Given how core comments are to blogging, we decided a while ago that we’d like to offer a top-notch commenting service ourselves. We got to know the ID (IntenseDebate) team through Matt’s involvement with the TechStars program and as we started talking to them in more depth, it became clear that we have a lot in common. ID is a small and frugal team focused on technology and product — just like us. Several thousand publishers have already
enabled ID on their sites including many WordPress users.

ID will remain a stand-alone service that can be used with WordPress as well as many other types of web sites (similar to the way we run our Akismet and Gravatar services). In addition, some ID features and technology will be built directly into future versions of WordPress and Gravatar.