Andrew Mager posted an illustrated play-by-play of Saturday's WordCamp, a conference devoted to the popular open-source blogging platform WordPress. According to Mager's report, the hosted version of WordPress has 2.3 million new blogs in 12 months and 35 million posts, and more than 6.5 billion page views.
(Credit:
Andrew Mager)
Of particular interest for the WordPress crowd is BuddyPress, a set of plug-ins that brings Facebook-like features, such as friends, groups, private messaging, status updates, and extended profiles, to the blogging platform. (WordPress competitor Six Apart also recently introduced a social dimension to its Movable Type platform.)
BuddyPress is slated for 1.0 status in December 2008.
(Credit: Andrew Mager)As Mager reported, unlike the popular social networks, BuddyPress isn't a closed environment: "Why do we need another social network? BuddyPress is not another "data silo" like Facebook and MySpace. It's mission is to be more open source, handle better control of data, give people better choices, and build greater support for open standards."
Being more open isn't a necessarily going to move people out of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or other semi-permeable walled gardens. However, the combination of emerging open standards, such as OpenSocial, and the growing WordPress and Six Apart communities will have an impact on embedding a social dimension into the fabric of every application.
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."
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