I went onto the excellent Polldaddy earlier to create a poll for Compare.ie, and found it was pretty much ‘down’. I couldn’t log in, and kept coming back again and again without success, until about 7pm GMT. Now the reason is clear, today Automattic announced their acquisition of Polldaddy, and it is fantastic news for Irish Internet companies. Why? Polldaddy was conceived, and is based, in Sligo!
Automattic pretty much owns and develops one of the most popular, free, open-source blogging platforms in the world today – WordPress. Matt Mullenweg, the main man at Automattic, is in his early twenties and has been on an acquisition spree with $30 million of investors money since 2007. And it seems to be paying off big time.
Not only has Polldaddy now been integrated with WordPress.com blog subscribers, it is now available for the downloadable and installable latest release of WordPress.
So, what next for Automattic? Anyone with half a brain would be able to figure out that by enabling publishers and bloggers to create content, Automattic will kick off a further revolution in self publishing, as the now Google-owned Blogger did many years ago. And with self-publishing revolutions comes the desire for those small scale publishers and bloggers to monetize their pages and traffic. With that comes an ad network which can be trusted by those publishers and integrates with WordPress effectively.
Google have already supplied a white-label version of their successful Adwords system to Aol, so why not Automattic / WordPress too?
Looks like Mr. Mullenweg is set to join the likes of Mark Zuckerberg in the list of big league internet entrepreneurs. And fair play to him too.
A link to Matt Mullenwegs announcement on his blog is here.