PollDaddy, the widget maker that lets bloggers add polls and surveys to their site, is now part of WordPress company Automattic. Founder Matt Mullenweg described looking around the web at similar products and compared PollDaddy to WordPress itself:
“Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren’t the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.”
PollDaddy burst onto the scene over two years ago. We first covered the tool at Widgets Live in 2006.
Automattic wasted no time integrating PollDaddy. It added a PollDaddy plugin with the company as author. Even bigger, it added an option for polls on WordPress.com, the company’s hosted solution.
There’s a brand new plugin for WordPress that now fully supports the power of OpenID. Will Norris and Chris Messina have released version 3 of the OpenID plugin for WordPress, which lets you turn your blog into an OpenID provider. To take full advantage of the plugin, you’ll also need the XRDS-Simple plugin, a service discover framework.
As with previous versions, users can login with an OpenID to leave a comment. This is especially useful for blogs that require registration that ordinarily would keep users from leaving comments. OpenID is even a good option for sites that allow anonymous comments, as it gives users a way to legitimize their comment, possibly avoiding administrator moderation.
Norris has a full post on the new plugin. The new features that excite me are the ability to be an OpenID provider. This is often the only way large companies support OpenID, but it’s been difficult for Joe Blogger to be able to do the same. With the latest plugin, you can use the base domain as your OpenID. You can also allow other bloggers or commenters on your blog to have their own OpenIDs, something like example.com/author/username.
Another great feature, if you’re only using the plugin for yourself, is a simple way to delegate to another OpenID service. At the bottom of your user profile (Users menu in the admin, then Your Profile), is the option for OpenID delegation.
Here you can choose another OpenID provider to handle authentication, while still using your own domain as your OpenID identifier. This gives you the power to change providers in the future, and appear the same to others. That’s about as open as it gets.
Be sure to check out the 10+ proven plugins. Chris O’Rourke skims off the cream of the crop of WordPress plugins. You can even preview one of the recommended plugins right on the page. The slides are displayed with the Gallery Lightbox plugin.
Another one to check out is designing themes with free tools. You may have your development environment all figured out, but you might find something new in Eric Amundson’s talk.
Webmonkey was proud to be a sponsor and I enjoyed tracking its progress online. It looks like it was quite the event. Congrats to the organizers. Next year, we’ll have to go. Maybe you should, too.
During his interview at The Start Conference, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg announced that BuddyPress will be released before the end of the year. Based on the multi-user version of WordPress, BuddyPress has the features we all expect from a social network: friends, profiles, and tasteless photo galleries.
The same way WordPress lets anyone have a blog, BuddyPress will help anyone create a social network.
As we’ve mentioned before, we’d prefer BuddyPress to reach for some higher goals, like the distributed social network (DiSo) project. Hopefully, this is a step in that direction, making it easier for DiSo to succeed.
Mullenweg first announced the project in March. BuddyPress was created by Andy Peatling, who was hired by Mullenweg’s Automattic after the official BuddyPress announcement. Peatling has apparently been working furiously since.
Note: The original headline for this post stated that BuddyPress would be released by December. Mullenweg wrote in to tell us that BuddyPress’s components will be rolled out when they’re ready, with the full platform available around the end of the year (see his comment below).
The first three sessions at The Start Conference featured founders of the top three blogging platforms discussing how they started their businesses.
Evan Williams, perhaps now better known as the founder of Twitter, started Blogger in 1999. His company was actually working on a different product when Blogger took over.
Similarly, when he started Twitter, his company was working on podcast site Odeo. Williams spoke about the accidental successes and how he knew it was time to switch gears:
“There was no justification for doing this within the company, but it was too compelling to ignore.”
Twitter’s up-time troubles may be rooted in it beginning as a side project. At first they wanted to create something simple, a prototype of an idea. Williams explained it simply: “Then we never caught up.”
Matt Mullenweg founded WordPress when the developer of his blogging platform (B2) disappeared. Mullenweg banded together with other disappointed users to create what is now an extremely popular platform.
Mullenweg attributes WordPress’ success to its “slow, organic growth.” For several years, all the contributors had day jobs and coded away in the evenings. In 2006, he founded Automattic, a 25 person virtual company, distributed across the globe.
How do so many people work together without being in the same place?
“What we found works is breaking our projects down to the smallest possible iota… One of the worst things that can happen is two people working on the same thing. And that’s not too bad of a problem.”
Mena Trott discussed the early days of Six Apart, which she founded with her husband. The company makes Typepad and Movable Type blogging platforms. During the dot com nuclear winter, they hunkered in their apartment working on their product. They were intent on not taking venture capital, and even incorporated as an LLC to make it more difficult.
Of course, they eventually did take money, and are now a 200 person company. And why haven’t they sold?
“The company hasn’t reached its full potential yet, but we also haven’t had the right offer.”
PollDaddy, the widget maker that lets bloggers add polls and surveys to their site, is now part of WordPress company Automattic. Founder Matt Mullenweg described looking around the web at similar products and compared PollDaddy to WordPress itself:
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