Automattic Inc, the company that developed the Wordpress blogging software, has announced the acquisition of Colorado based commenting system Intense Debate.  The amount involved was not declared either by Intense Debate CEO Tom Keller or Toni Schneider, Automattic boss. Intense Debate has said that it will be going back to an invite only system in the immediate future until the integration is complete. The announcement was made on Tuesday (Techstars demo day at Mountain View, California).

Intense Debate and Wordpress have a similar base ( PHP and MySQL). The Intense Debate brand will remain separate though.

Intense Debate was founded in October 2006 by Josh Morgan, Jon Fox and Isaac Keyet, and was accepted into the Techstars program in June 2007. Development of the comment system began in June, and the company went into a private beta in August 2007. It became open to the public in October. ID’s main rivals include Disqus, Js-Kit and Sezwho. Morgan left the company, but not before appointing Keller as CEO.