Webware

As I have said in recent stories about short URLs, I believe that content management systems (blogging platforms, for example) should have their own short-link generators. Why hand over control of your traffic -- and your analytics -- to a third party, after all?

Automattic's Wordpress.com has launched just exactly this: its own built-in short-link generator. When you're creating a post on the Wordpress.com service, you get an option to create a wp.me link alongside the post's default link.

Wordpress.com users can now get short links from the blog entry page.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The big advantage to these links, over links from third parties, is that they are pretty much guaranteed to work as long as the Wordpress.com system lives. There's no additional point of failure you introduce by using one of these links. They're also really easy to generate -- you get a short link as you're writing your post.

Short links have been created for every post created using the Wordpress.com platform, which also means that the short links aren't as short as they could otherwise be. When I tried to get new short links for posts on my own blog, the identifying part of the link was eight characters long. New and sparely used shorteners create shorter links: Vb.ly is still creating two-character identifiers.

The Wordpress.com link shortener is "bespoke," Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg told me. "The whole point," he said, "is to couple the permanence of the shortened URL with the canonical one."

Mullenweg also said that Wordpress software users (as opposed to users of the Wordpress.com platform) can get access to the shortener if they use the Stats plugin. Update: That feature isn't available just yet.

Web-based polling and survey company PollDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind the Wordpress platform and the Wordpress.com blog hosting service.

PollDaddy offers free polls. (My most recent one is on this post: Five old-fashioned Web concepts that need to die.) The option to run more detailed surveys costs either $200 or $899 a year, depending on the volume of replies you've signed up for.

PollDaddy is based in Sligo, Ireland. CEO David Lenehan told me the company will be staying there and that his office becomes, "Automattic's first office anywhere in the world." Lenehan is "extremely happy" with the deal, terms of which he did not disclose. He said that PollDaddy was "profitable and growing at a nice rate" prior to the acquisition.

Product changes that have already been implemented include tighter integration into Wordpress.com hosted blogs and a transition to Automattic's data centers. In a blog post about the acquisition, Lenehan wrote, "Over the coming weeks and months this will mean our site will be a lot more stable, polls will load faster, and everything should run just the way you want it to."

The company will continue to stay "100 percent focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow," Lenehan also wrote.

Polldaddy has already been integrated into Wordpress.com's authoring system.

In a barter arrangement with CNET, PollDaddy ran the voting system for the last Webware 100 awards.

See also: Matt Mullenweg's blog: PollDaddy Goes Automattic

Automattic, parent company of blogging platform WordPress, has acquired IntenseDebate, the free blog comment enhancement tool. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The service launched a little more than a year ago with several innovative features that effectively take over a blog's commenting system and add things like reputation, ranking, and a centralized area where blog administrators can manage comments across several sites at once.

Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says two of the main reasons for the pickup are IntenseDebate's e-mail replies and rating system which will likely make their way as the default offerings on WordPress.com and WordPress.org products in the near future.

For the time being, IntenseDebate has closed its doors to new users. In a post about the acquisition co-founder Jon Fox says it will be reopened to all as soon as it can prepare for a higher level of scaling. How big you ask? Like all of WordPress.org installs and WordPress.com, 4 million-plus users big.

The good news in all of this is that, according to Fox, IntenseDebate will remain a cross-platform product. From its very beginnings it has been open to other blogging tools like Blogger and MovableType. If anything, the closer integration with upcoming versions of WordPress should help accelerate development.

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 creators of WordPress) has created a microblogging service, but it's not for everyone--and that's the point.

It's called Prologue, and it's a new theme for WordPress.com users and blogs running off hosted WordPress installs. The goal of the theme is to let anyone setup a microblog, either for themselves or as a group--both public and private. Users can post short, to-the-point messages to their blog without having to go through WordPress' primary interface. It's essentially doing what Twitter can't, which is letting people create their own private groups and tag their posts for sorting later on.

Besides its privacy and tag controls, the real power of Prologue is that any WordPress user can adopt it on top of their current blog. It's also got a leg up on the competition by letting other users comment on a Prologue post like they would a normal blog post, complete with conversation threading and a permalink in case you feel like sharing that conversation or single comment with someone else. Sounds an awful lot like a forum to me, but considering Automattic is aiming this at "small groups" it's nice to directly reply to someone without an @username that they have to fish out later on.

In an introductory blog post, WordPress creator and former CNET'er Matt Mullenweg noted that "many" Automattic employees were already using Twitter, but wanted something with a little more versatility and with more privacy controls, which led to the creation of Prologue. The one thing that's still missing is a first party mobile front end. Despite the strong efforts from many third party developers to create their own, there still isn't a simple way to get it done unless you've got your own hosted blog with the right plug-ins, something competitor Movable Type has been a little more proactive about.

Skip WordPress' powerful blogging front-end and check out Prologue, a simplified microblogging front-end that lets you write small posts by yourself or with a group of others.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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."

In part two of my interview with Matt Mullenweg (see also part one) of WordPress and Automattic, we discussed the release of WordPress 2.2, including its new widgets and Ajax-enhanced interface.

I asked Mullenweg what his favorite widgets were and although he said he "doesn't like most widgets," he did call out some of the blogosphere utilities like Sphere (review) and Technorati.

No conversation with Mullenweg would be complete without a discussion of the WordPress antispam utility, Akismet -- a service inspired by the young developer's mother. I also find it interesting that while Mullenweg is an ardent booster of open-source development, Akismet is closed. Watch the interview to see why.

Other topics covered: the pressure of running a service that people make their living on, the relationship with Automattic CEO Tony Schneider, and the goodness of what "Web 2.0" stands for. Plus, Matt's favorite Web 2.0 sites and his tip for keeping multiple computers in sync.