The Social

MIAMI--The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank." Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses--URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.

Marks wasn't the only one expounding upon e-mail's suckiness. Earlier in the day, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg inferred that overwhelming volumes of spam were making Web users explore options other than e-mail.

And when a lively group of Web 2.0 elite (including Mullenweg, Digg's Kevin Rose, Pownce's Leah Culver, and Flickr's Cal Henderson) tackled a panel led by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld that involved creating the concept for a new Web app in 45 minutes, their end result was a product that would make e-mail less of a headache by making sure that users reply to everything. (It was done in 45 minutes, so the specifics weren't totally ironed out.)

To top it all off, when I had a meeting with Marks on Friday morning, we used Twitter direct messaging rather than e-mail to confirm the time and location.

That was before Twitter suffered a downage when the start-up's architect, Blaine Cook, was giving a talk later in the day at FOWA and his phone kept ringing with calls from the site's server administrators. Twitter's unreliability is well-known, and certainly calls into question the fact that all these messaging start-ups and social-networking features that are supposedly killing e-mail still might not be stable enough to overhaul the way we communicate.

The recent high-profile e-mail provider crashes, however, provide a counterpoint.

This post was updated at 4:49 PM PT with a clarification from Matt Mullenweg.

MIAMI--"I'm Matt Mullenweg, and I'm famous for eating 108 Chicken McNuggets and surviving," the eccentric 24-year-old WordPress founder said in his talk at the Future of Web Apps conference, explaining that he's no longer continually the No. 1 "Matt" in a Google search because the dancing viral-video star "Where The Hell Is Matt?" gives him a run for his money.

At FOWA, Mullenweg was slated to talk about both the physical and psychological "architecture" of WordPress, which has gained both positive buzz and popularity for being simply constructed, easy to use, and remarkably efficient.

"Scale is what separates us from the other industries of the world," he explained, saying that it's only in the technology business that a tiny entrepreneurial team can create something used by millions of people. WordPress, Mullenweg said, powers 2,523,000 blogs, gets 135 million global unique visitors, and has only 19 full-time employees.

Matt Mullenweg

(Credit: Wordpress)

"All these old-media companies are adding blogs like it's going out of style," he said, talking about how WordPress now powers blogs for The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News ("unfortunately," he added on that last one).

Mullenweg added later in a conversation that he didn't intend "unfortunately" to sound the way it did and that he meant no offense to WordPress' major media clients.

He had quite a bit of advice for the audience. "Be the person in the support forums who's answering everybody's questions," Mullenweg advised start-up entrepreneurs in the room. If you don't look like you're hard-core about your company and its users, he said, you won't build up a following.

It was a pretty geek speak-intensive talk, with Mullenweg explaining to the developer-filled concert hall how WordPress handles server and bandwidth demands, and how to take advantage of systems like Memcached, which was originally developed for social-media pioneer LiveJournal. But he also expounded a bit on the Web 2.0 landscape and some of the issues it faces--like spam, the ugly side of the open-social Web. WordPress has deleted more than 800,000 "splogs," or spam blogs, for example.

Spammers are "the terrorists of Web 2.0," Mullenweg said. "They come into our communities and take advantage of our openness." He suggested that people may have moved away from e-mail and toward messaging systems like Facebook messaging and Twitter to get away from spam. But with all those "zombie bites" showing up in his Facebook in-box, he explained, the spammers are pouncing on openness once again.

He also has a pretty nontraditional view of ad revenues, the supposed cash coffer of new-media sites. "Most of you have never, and will never, seen an ad on WordPress.com," Mullenweg said, referring to WordPress.org's free blog-hosting arm. "We decided to show ads only on certain pages, only to the people who were sort of random drive-by visitors...if you use Firefox, you'll never see an ad, no matter what, mostly because I like Firefox."

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."