We’re still at The Next Web Conference 2009 here in Amsterdam, and I just ran into Matt Mullenweg from Automattic / WordPress and immediately cornered him, put him against a brick wall outside and got him to answer some questions about the company and WordPress.
The takeaways:
– BuddyPress, which is supposed to transform an installation of WordPress MU into some sort of a white-label social networking platform, is going to be launched ‘relatively shortly’. Mullenweg calls it “Facebook-in-a-box”.
– The latest version of WordPress (version 2.7.1) is seeing about 27,000 downloads a day (the built-in auto updater helps a lot, apparently).
– WordPress.com saw 175,000+ new blog posts from a little under 200,000 bloggers in the last 24 hours (translated to about 44.5 million words) alone. A quick look at the site’s comScore stats pegs monthly uniques to have reached 24.4 million U.S. visitors last month, compared to 48.3 million for Blogger and 13.3 million for Six Apart services. For reference, Facebook’s March traffic was at 61.2 million unique visitors.
– Real-time status updating is not threatening regular blogging, according to Mullenweg. When asked if Twitter is sucking the life out of blogging, he responded that blogging is not slowing down and that the service is actually quite complimentary with WordPress.
– Automattic acquired 3 companies last year (IntenseDebate, PollDaddy and BuddyPress) and is definitely considering doing more of that. Mullenweg says “it’s fun” but that he’s not planning on making any announcements shortly because he’s still waiting for the prices to go down.
Here’s the full interview: