After the recent acquisition of IntenseDebate by Automattic, the former has been re-launched. The service had opened its doors in 2007 and was in a private beta mode post-acquisition. IntenseDebate has also released the public beta of its Wordpress plug-in. It contains a lot of features that make it much more appealing to blog owners.

One of the most important features is its two-way comment syncing. It copies all comments that are there on the users’ blogs using the IntenseDebate system to the users’ WordPress install. One of the most common complaints about the earlier version was that the comments continued to remain on the servers and consequently left the blog owners in a bind if they decided to discontinue their system. These included IntenseDebate and its close competitor Disqus.

Disqus released a 2.0 version in August and IntenseDebate has followed suit. Some of the other new features include integration with the WordPress administrative panel, search engine-optimized comments, setting and profile sync, and trackback support.

WordPress is also expected to start integrating some of the IntenseDebate features into its own standard install which would begin with version 2.7.