Matt Mullenweg, creator of blogging platform WordPress, said in a blog post on Tuesday that "the future is social."
With that, he announced that WordPress parent company Automattic has hired designer and developer Andy Peatling, who has created a WordPress-based social network called BuddyPress.
BuddyPress, meanwhile, has become part of Automattic's arsenal. The project's home page has been replaced with an Automattic logo and the teaser "BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social-network platform."
Mullenweg was a featured speaker at last week's Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, where talk of standards like OpenSocial and OpenID dominated the rhetoric.
Those same themes seem to be integral to WordPress' interest in the open-source BuddyPress. "Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly free and open -ource alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape," Mullenweg wrote in Tuesday's blog post.
WordPress hinted at some social undercurrents to the service when it launched WordPress Prologue, essentially a Twitter-like "microblogging" service for groups to communicate privately on the WordPress platform.
Earlier this year, Mullenweg announced that Automattic had raised $29.5 in venture funding, and several bloggers speculated that it would be used, in part, to hire more employees.
The latest Automattic hire likely won't have to go through too much company training, as he's been a longtime devotee to the company's products. "I've been all-consumed in WordPress for the past two years now, (and) I think almost every single site I've built since working as a freelancer has used WordPress in some way," Peatling wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "To get the opportunity to concentrate fully on WordPress every day, and also the chance to help mold WordPress in new ways, is a fantastic one not to be missed."
Automattic, the company best-known for blog publishing software WordPress, has raked in $29.5 million in Series B funding. Originally reported on several blogs, the funding round was confirmed by Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg in his personal blog Tuesday evening.
The most notable of the investors is the New York Times Co., which joins existing Automattic investors Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Automattic turned down an acquisition offer several months ago from a "larger Internet company." Mullenweg's only apparent reference to this in his blog post was his statement that WordPress had become so successful that choosing between the "approach of serious acquisition or majority-stake investments" became an obvious next step.
Automattic has about 18 employees, according to the Journal, and also operates several lesser-known software products like forum software BBPress and spam management product Akismet. But WordPress is its centerpiece, powering around 2.2 million blogs--active and otherwise--from personal blogs to the digital properties of high-profile media publications like The New York Times, Fortune, and CNN. The Journal hinted that some of the $29.5 million will be used to allow some early employees and investors to cash out; GigaOm's Om Malik suggested that the company may also hire more engineers, anticipating continued growth.
Mullenweg's blog post seemed to confirm this speculation: "Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better Web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in antispam, identity, wikis, forums, and more -- small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far."
- prev
- 1
- next
