Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has aquired Intense Debate (ID), a hosted commenting system based in Colorado yesterday.

ID with its cool features like threading, e-mail replies, reputation points, voting, and global profiles will be built directly into future versions of WordPress and Gravatar. It means better management, tracking, organization and easier comment flow with the holy grail of a universal OpenID. And with its comment importers and exporters feature, you are free from the fear of losing your comments database.

I couldn't find out how big is the money for the acquisition. Do you know? With 4,194,374 blogs hosted in WordPress.com alone, and still counting, along with more than a quarter of a million legitimate comments every day, I bet it is huge money.