I have some cool news: On Sunday the day after WordCamp San Francisco we’re going to host a WordPress developer day at the Automattic office on Pier 38. It will be Barcamp-style with no pre-announced schedule, but expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now, there should be plenty of room for everyone to connect. (Try to keep things local though, we’re not sure how the internet will hold up.)
Category Archives: Automattic
How P2 Changed Automattic
If you haven’t heard of P2 yet, check out this quick video:
Almost everyone at Automattic is a blogger, but for the first couple of years of the company we didn’t blog much internally. Everything happened over IRC, Skype, and email. (In that order.) Eventually we started a blog that worked like a traditional blog did with long posts and comments, but everyone forgot to visit it until I wrote a quick script on cron job that would email everybody summaries of new posts and comments.
There was a disconnect we couldn’t reconcile: even though our internal blogs didn’t work out most of the company was active on Twitter every day. (WordPress users are some of the most passionate adopters of micro-blogging.)
We found a solution in Prologue which added a posting box to the home page and gave it a Twitter-like feel. Now Automattic had a pulse, a place where the incredible amount of activity was chronicled and captured. It was low-friction and hassle-free, we all started using it more.
But there was still a problem, Prologue was great for status updates but terribly awkward for conversation. P2 solves all this by moving the conversation inline on the homepage. Conversations can be fully threaded using 2.7’s new comment features. Finally the blog started to get so busy we made it real time so you can just leave the page open and new stuff will come in. (It’s hard to describe, so watch the video above.) Seemingly simple changes have increased engagement many-fold: our main P2 now has over 4,700 posts in it with 1,100 of those in the past 60 days.
It completely transformed how Automattic works internally and I think is one of the most valuable things we’ve adopted in the past year. I’m on the road a lot, and sometimes my only connection is checking the mobile-optimized P2 on my iPhone.
I’m excited about P2 partly because blogs provide an incredibly robust infrastructure on which to build more advanced apps and this is a good example of that. I’d love to see more themes that transform what WordPress can do top-to-bottom.
You can get P2 for your WordPress.org blog here, and it’s available for all of WordPress.com too.
WP.com
Blo.gs Lives On
Do you guys remember Blo.gs? In addition to being a cool domain, it’s a ping-update service like Ping-O-Matic that was started by Jim Winstead and acquired by Yahoo in June of 2005.
Some exciting news today: Yahoo! is transferring blo.gs to Automattic for safekeeping and further development. I’ve been a long-time fan of the service, and it even inspired the early WordPress feature which reordered your blogroll based on update times.
We’re looking forward to beefing up the service and giving it a refresh, while continuing its reputation for reliability. It makes me nostalgic to hear the name “blo.gs” again, I even still have the t-shirt they made for a Feedmesh meetup years ago. (For a big blast from the past, check out the discussion around feedmesh and real-time, distributed updates. Everything old is new again.) Major kudos to Yahoo! for giving us the chance to do so — I think most companies would have just shuttered it.
Sun, Oracle, WordPress, and MySQL
It’s magically beautiful outside in San Francisco today, but instead everyone is talking about the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. (More on Techmeme.) A number of people have contacted me with questions to the effect of “Oracle is evil, they now own MySQL, WordPress runs on MySQL, OMG! What’s next?” In addition to the millions of WordPress blogs all using MySQL, all of the projects Automattic contributes to are MySQL-based and we run more than 250 servers dedicated to MySQL.
Last Thursday at The Next Web I talked about how we need an Internet Bill of Rights to protect our data and the countless hours we pour into complex online services, such as Facebook and Last.fm, and that the foundations for this were laid down 20 years ago by Richard Stallman and the GPL.
Today our servers are running various versions of MySQL, tomorrow they’ll be running the same thing, and if need be ten years from now they can run the exact some software. Because of the GPL every WordPress user in the world is protected — we’re not beholden to any one company, only to what works best for us. Today that’s MySQL, tomorrow that’s MySQL, a year from now we’ll see.
Most importantly whatever happens will happen on our timeline. That’s the definition of Freedom.
Here are few other reasons not to be worried, and a bonus at the end.
- Oracle bought Innobase, makers of the InnoDB engine that most large users deploy as their main storage engine, in October 2005. The sky has not yet fallen.
- As a company Automattic has never really needed the support services that MySQL provides and even if we did there are plenty of third parties also providing support.
- Most of the useful updates for MySQL have been coming from outside, to quote Jeremy Zawodny:
The single most interesting and surprising thing to me is both the number and necessity of third-party patches for enhancing various aspects of MySQL and InnoDB. Companies like Percona, Google, Proven Scaling, Prime Base Technologies, and Open Query are all doing so in one way or another.
On the one hand, it’s excellent validation of the Open Source model. Thanks to reasonable licensing, companies other than Sun/MySQL are able to enhance and fix the software and give their changes back to the world.
- In terms of innovation, the most interesting developments have been from outside as well, in projects like Drizzle. (I would not be surprised if this moment is for Drizzle what Movable Type changing their licensing was for WordPress, even though in this case they’re both Open Source.)
- I’ve met a number of people at Sun who are incredibly smart, and if they stick around I expect cool things to continue to come out.
- There are some new developments in the WordPress world, namely that I think it would be possible to add support for databases other than MySQL without changing every $wpdb call or breaking any plugins or themes. It won’t be easy, but the coolest stuff seldom is.
Anyway, I now really wish I had agreed to keynote at the MySQL User Conference starting today. 🙂
WordPress Party Pictures
Pictures from the party at the Automattic lounge. It got a little rowdy! If you recognize, please help caption using the “tag” feature on the photo page.
WordPress Party Tonight
Tonight (Monday March 30) at 7 PM we’re opening up the new Automattic space at Pier 38 for the first time because so many of our friends will be in town for Web 2.0 Expo and all their fun events. Come by our spot (on Embarcadero in between Brannan and Townsend) starting at 7 PM and enjoy good music, free booze, and geeky friends. We’re on the left corner and there’s a bunch of circles in the window and an Automattic sign over the door. (Sorry for the late announcement, if you could help us get the word out I’d appreciate it.) You can RSVP on Facebook here.
Tune in to WordPress.tv
Today we’ve switched on WordPress.tv, a new space to geek out and learn about all things WordPress.
WordPress.tv is home to tutorials for both WordPress self-installs and WordPress.com to help you get blogging fast and hassle-free.
We’ve also aggregated and organized all that awesome WordCamp footage from around the web, on WordCampTV. There you’ll find videos and slideshows of presentations made by Automattic employees and other WordPress gurus, plus interviews I’ve done with the media and fellow bloggers.
Tune in regularly for fresh content and updates to the WordPress.tv blog.
As always, community comes first. You have a say in shaping the future of WordPress.tv. Just drop us a line and let us know what you’d like to see added next.
Intensely Automattic Change.gov
Everyone is honored and excited today that Change.gov, the website of President Elect Barack Obama, has turned on IntenseDebate comments to discuss things like health care.
Micah Sifry has an excellent write up of the topic.
Imagine what happens if those numbers–on not just any “centralized site” but the one that symbolically and perhaps literally has the attention of the President-elect–start climbing into the five- and six-digits. Before our eyes, we are witnessing the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system. [emphasis added]
[…]
By using IntenseDebate (and the OpenID framework), the Obama transition is actually enabling a lot of interesting community development to start happening beneath the surface of a threaded discussion. Users get their own “commenter profile” on IntenseDebate, along with reputation points, and they can carry those profiles onto other sites that use the same system. Users can also choose to follow other IntenseDebate users, so if someone is really diligent they could start to gather a group or a crowd around them.
It has even started to make the cable news, as evidenced in this clip.
Pretty exciting! And it’s also a reaffirmation of Automattic’s platform-agnostic approach to Akismet, Gravatar, PollDaddy, and IntenseDebate that although Change.gov uses Expression Engine for their CMS they’ve chosen IntenseDebate for their comments.
PollDaddy Goes Automattic
It’s another exciting day here at Automattic. Today we finally get to announce that we’ve acquired the market-leading poll and survey service PollDaddy.
For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I’ve also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.
As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.
Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren’t the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.
I took a secret trip to Sligo and put back a few pints with the team and we decided to make things work. They went to bed every night and woke up every morning thinking about polls and surveys, and were iterating at a great pace. By plugging into Automattic’s experience at creating internet-scale services and the distribution of WordPress.com, I knew we could take Polldaddy to an entirely new level in a relatively short amount of time.
Today we just enabled PollDaddy integration with 4.4 million blogs on WordPress.com and have released the first version of their .org plugin.
You can read more about the acquisition on the PollDaddy blog, Toni’s blog, and the WP.com blog. I’m super excited to have Lenny and Eoin as part of the Automattic family, and I’m looking forward to seeing the service flourish with its newfound resources.
Intense Debate Goes Automattic
Some cool news today — Automattic is acquiring Intense Debate. You can read more on Jon’s blog on Intense Debate, or on Toni’s blog, or on VC Mike’s blog.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the product, Intense Debate supercharges the comment section of WordPress blogs and other sites with cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles. There are a few companies tackling this space right now, but I was impressed with how much ID (Intense Debate) has been able to do with a small team, and happy to find that their common platform (PHP and MySQL) would make integration a lot easier.
Going forward, the plan is to keep Intense Debate available as a platform-agnostic independent service, much like Akismet. We’ll start to integrate its features into WordPress core, WordPress.com, and Gravatar as appropriate. For example, comment threading is going to be in WordPress 2.7, but reply by email is a lot easier to implement on a hosted service like WordPress.com. We’re also going to be able to lend our expertise in scaling to the ID team to make sure their users enjoy the same hassle-free speed and bulletproof availability as users of other Automattic services.
Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.
We were early in the space with investing in Akismet to solve the spam problem, but now I think the real growth opportunities are in the user interaction and social features across comments. There is a huge opportunity to increase the traffic and engagement of blogs significantly. WordPress.com alone already gets about three legitimate comments every second — more than a quarter of a million every day. I’m excited to see what the Intense Debate team can do to make things more interesting.
Automattic Office
Automatticians hanging out at True’s office, with Domas, and grabbing dinner.
Act Two
You’ve probably seen the news on GigaOM, Automattic has raised a new “series B” round of funding. We’re entering what I consider Act II of the Automattic story. I’ll talk about where we’re going, but first some history.
In 2005 Automattic was small. Through some miracle I had convinced Donncha O Caoimh, Andy Skelton, and Ryan Boren to leave their safe jobs, join a company with almost no money in the bank run by someone with no experience, and whose core idea was to give away and open source all our core IP. There were more questions than answers. Would a hosted version of WordPress move beyond the geek appeal the OS project had? How would the virtual company with no office work? Could we develop a service alongside an OS project without screwing both of them up? Should I raise money? Most importantly, would it scale?
In 2006 we developed a series of answers (sometimes hard-learned) to those questions. WordPress was obviously limited by its installation requirements — when it was added as a one-click to web hosts and when WordPress.com (and other MU hosts) made it simple to get a blog the popularity grew beyond what I could have ever imagined. In the WordPress.org world it wasn’t perfect — I consider the long period between versions 2.0 and 2.1 a personal failure — but after that initial bump the development really picked up and the community and usage exploded. There have been 5,880,790 downloads of WordPress.org since Automattic started. (3,852,554 in the past year alone.)
We ended up raising a small amount of money (1.1 million) to allow the company to take some risks without worrying about payroll but we ended up using very little of that capital because revenues grew quickly, allowing us to remain break-even even as the team scaled to 18 full-time folks and a number of contractors. Toni Schneider left Yahoo to join as CEO, a partner I couldn’t imagine getting along better with, and we started to look like a real company despite having no office and some of us never meeting in person.
Fast forward to 2007: many of the seeds planted started to really bloom. On WordPress.com 1.8 million new users joined, they created 25 million posts, we served 3.2 billion dynamic pageviews, and grew to reach over 100 million unique users worldwide. Akismet blocked billions of spams from reaching blogs. Nearly every major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more, have embraced WordPress. Finally the approach of serious acquisition or majority-stake investments brought up the biggest question we’d faced so far: should we sell, or build out Automattic to be an independent company for many years to come.
That decision actually wasn’t hard. I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunities and it became clear that the road ahead was much longer than the road behind us.
That brings us to today. The New York Times, the flagship of media, is joining our existing investors Polaris, True, and Radar in expanding their minority stake in the company. Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more — small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far.
See also: GigaOM, Toni Schneider, New York Times, Techcrunch, Wall Street Journal, Mark Jaquith, Jackie Danicki, Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Michael Bazeley, Venturebeat, Lloyd Budd, Raanan Bar-Cohen, bu.blicio.us, VC Mike.
P.S. I’ve moved to a new domain, ma.tt, but more on that later. You can subscribe to my feed here.
Support Job
Automattic has a new position we’re hiring for.
Automattic and Six Apart
Raanan Joins
Raanan Bar-Cohen is joining Automattic from Dow Jones. He’s got a disclaimer in his sidebar, “This site is not maintained utilizing the author’s employer’s resources or on company time.” Little does he know that blogging on company time is a requirement here. 🙂
Meaningful Overnight Relationship
One thing I’ve noticed about talking to certain types of press, particularly mainstream, is that they have a pattern in mind before they write about something, and the better you conform to the pattern the more coverage you get.
I think what they really want is an unusually young founder, possibly with a partner, who stumbled on an idea in an epiphany moment, implemented it in days, and then enjoyed overnight success, preferably capped with some sort of financial hook such as a huge VC funding or selling out to a large company for millions of dollars.
It’s not uncommon to get leading questions trying to hit a point in the above patterns… Yes, WordPress really is four years old. I was 19. No, I didn’t create it alone, if I did you would have never heard of it. Actually, it entered a rather crowded field, not even close to being first. No, not planning to sell it, there isn’t really anything to sell, it’s more of a movement. No, I didn’t make 60 million dollars in 18 months.
What’s worst is I think these stories sell a false promise and hope to people outside of the industry — it attracts the wrong type of entrepreneurs — and inside of the industry it distracts us from what really matters.
Someday I think there will be a realization that the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.
Finally it’s not Web 2.0, or another bandwagon me-too content management system with AJAX, it’s a mature project that has been around and grown up over four years of hard work, and it has many, many more years of hard work ahead of it. I smile these days when I see WordPress referred to as an “overnight success,” if only they knew how long an overnight success takes.
Update, see also:
- 2009-03-19: 37signals — Overnight succes takes years
Apokalyptik
Demitrious has joined Automattic. Now go guilt him into blogging more. 🙂
Automattic is Hiring
Automattic is now accepting applications for two positions, one development and the other systems. For me it’s a dream job because I get to work with the smartest group of people I’ve ever met. Who knows — it might be a good fit for a photomatt.net reader.
Startup Essentials Update
Today I talked with Kevin Olsen from Sun’s Startup Essentials program a bit about what happened in our case. He said they were pretty overwhelmed with the few couple of weeks of inquiries, and it sounds like they’re doing them by hand. About 20% of their emails didn’t get through to applicants because they were caught in spam filters. (They’ve started calling and snail mailing to get around that.) Finally someone has mistyped the name of our company as Automatic instead of Automattic (two Ts) and a company that was older than 4 years had applied as “Automatic” and was rejected, and somehow our application got caught up in that.