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:
I’m still hoping they do more with the IntenseDebate integration.
Interesting that he doesn’t feel like Twitter is sucking the life out of blogging. I know personally with Twitter, I often feel less inclined to blog about something when I can just Twitter it out.
Nice to hear about that. Specially the “buddypress’. I am waiting for it’s launch; hope to find it good.
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
if you opt to twitter something instead of blogging, then you are certainly helping blogs in the long run. No one needs to read something if it’s possible to twitter it over blogging it. I’m positive that you are completely useless as a blogger.
Sure but you can bring your tweets into your blog (a domain you control and will be around forever) and also push your blog posts into your tweets.
Matt is an awesome guy!
He had talked about the same Buddypress and rise of wordpress in Wordcamp India last time.
Btw nice interview!
http://www.thew...camp-india.html
If wordpress would allow Javascript in their free blogs, then the blogging platform can see a huge gain in membership and active bloggers. Matt needs to relook into this because its one way they can make money by allowing members to each money and take a share out of it.
Overall Wordpress Rocks
WordPress.org (the software you download and install on your $5/month host) has absolutely no restrictions.
Allowing people to run Javascript on a hosted service isn’t just a security nightmare, it’s a sure way to attract millions of spammer, sploggers, and other con men to your service.
ime, buddypress still needs a lot of work architecturally. or perhaps it’s just the philosophy of wordpress mu pushing through. each user account created registered ends up using at least 3 database tables, and possibly more if they choose to create their own blogs as well.
i brought this up as a ‘bug’ but was told I didn’t understand database architecture and that this was done to make scaling easier. There’s absolutely nothing in the code (or, wasn’t 4 months ago) to implement this sort of crude sharding (user X has data on db Y, etc). I suspect that unless buddypress gets a big overhaul, it’ll just end up hitting some big resource walls pretty quickly. Unfortunately, it may just encourage people to add ridiculous amounts of hardware to support the bad architecture decision(s).
It *looks* nice, but if I had it to do over again, I might delve deeper in to elgg before going with buddypress.
Actually this is no longer the case. Only WPMU will create extra tables for blogs. You should revisit it, as four months is a long time away from a project moving as fast as BuddyPress.
I realize it’s a long time, but the reaction I got was that it was the *right* way to do things, and that it wouldn’t be changing. So you’re saying that each user account no longer has three distinct tables (activity, activity_cached, friends_activity_cached)? If so, that’s great. I’m hoping there’s an upgrade process to migrate all that to one table.
You might also want to check out HyperDB, which is commonly-cited as the solution to sharding etc for WPMU: http://codex.wo...ess.org/HyperDB
The multiple-table approach is the same method we’ve used to scale up WordPress.com, which now has over 6.5 million blogs (8 tables each) getting a billion pageviews a month. It works!
@Matt – I don’t doubt it *can* scale if appropriate logic is in the codebase to handle the sharding. When I looked, it wasn’t there, and when I asked about it, was brushed off. And now someone else is reporting that the tables are not separated per user now.
@Matt – also, it’s not multiple tables per *blog* that I was as concerned about as *3* extra tables per user for buddypress ‘activity’ information (see table names listed in above post).
Just to clarify here (last post!)
http://trac.bud.../changeset/1265
shows that as of 3 weeks ago the “3 tables per user” activity stream stuff was removed. I guess the point from months ago about it not scaling well made it through to someone with commit rights.
Its removal wasn’t anything to do with the “more tables vs more rows” debate and which scales better.
It was entirely down to the fact that after extensive testing, the type of querying done for activity streams performed better on global tables.
@apeatling – so, the change wasn’t made regarding what scales better, but how it performs better? In my mind, those tend to be roughly the same things, but perhaps there’s a distinction to be made.
I thought it was commonly understood that, for LAMP systems (which seems to be the buddypress focus, but maybe I’m wrong in that too), default systems will run in to problems with more tables because of limits on file system inodes. I guess it’s good that ‘testing’ was done to verify the change, but i’m also not sure why any was needed. If no change was made, code would need to be added to have determined which db to connect to for information on various users.
I suspect people that have massive needs will use the partitioning capabilities of the database to scale out/up accordingly, and people that don’t (like me) will have fewer concerns about hitting resource limits with buddypress. Thanks.
That is AWESOME news. Can’t wait for the REAL buddypress release! It figures that the Wordpress founders would “get” what the market actually needs.
Nobody wants a forum anymore, they’re clumsy relics of the past and distant relatives of the pre-Internet BBS’s. What we want today is a real full-blown social network, similar to Facebook – around our sites.
vBulletin may have the best forum software out there (which we do use as an interim community on Ask Dan and Jennifer – for now), but that’s like making the best horse carriage when the guy down the street is selling automobiles.
They’ll figure it out eventually. The market’s wide open for the first guy who wakes up one morning and figures out forums are dead and people want REAL social networks today.
Great news again, can’t wait to see the first real BuddyPress release with full BBPress integration, etc.
Have an awesome day!
Dan (Ask Dan & Jennifer)
Wordpress is awesome. I have started using it only couple of months back and am surprised to see almost anything can be done with this. However my suggestion to Matt would be further simplify the way wordpress gets updated. It should be with one click. I had difficult time in getting my wordpress blog upgraded to 2.7.x http://edunetsys.com
Yes, it is.I know I am not the only one who has practically stopped blogging. Not because I don’t want to. But because I just don’t have time
What a nice guy. He must have rehearsed an answer to the Twitter question though – I see so many bloggers not updating their blogs but encouraging people to follow them on Twitter…
@Neeta Bas — Now that you are on WordPress 2.7, all future updates are literally 1-click via the admin dashboard.
@Robin Wauters — Those comScore numbers exclude any blogs on WordPress.com which map a domain (i.e. example.com instead of example.wordpress.com ). The Quantcast service includes those blogs, and puts us in the 58 million “unique people” range for the US: http://www.quan...p-18-mFEk4J448M
( Disclosure — I work at Automattic )
sometimes reality is harsh and better just to face it… blogging is definitely flat and more likely on the decline.
all you gotta do is ask people and yourself and it becomes clear. twitter and facebook are the next step in this evolutionary process.
What is his plan for bbpress?
twitter won’t kill blogging just like ski-jumping didn’t kill skiing.
I would be inclined to say that the appropriate metaphor in this case would be that snowboarding didn’t kill skiing. However, on a given slope anywhere in the world you will see a large % of snowboarders. Snowboarding diluted the skiing market share to some extent.
I would say Twitter has had the same effect on blogging. The volume of blog posts must be affected by the use of Twitter. However, I believe that blogs and Twitter now have slightly different purposes as a result. Twitter is the realtime, stream of consciousness water cooler conversation, whereas blogging is the realm of more studied, more directed writing and conversation.
Of course, some blogs are actually becoming more like Twitter by the day. Look at Mr. Mulenweg’s blog (http://ma.tt) for example. Besides links to photo galleries, his blog is not much different to a Twitter stream, being that the majority of recent entries contain little more than a few sentences and a link or two. If you go back to the archives of his blog, there was a lot more content and writing to most blog posts than that. Of course, this could simply be a time issue too.
Which I started doing about 5 years ago!
buddypress is already open for download from a long time ago
erm yeah, we´re talking version 1.0 here. A real release, not a beta download or so. There´s an RC1 out right now but no 1.0 so far
my attention span is only 140 characters…
No discussion of the previous ethics problems raised by TechCrunch and others? I’m rather surprised.
I don’t understand. Even when I have interviewed Matt on my own WordPress centric podcast, he has come clean in more than one occasion siting that he had made mistakes. It’s not as if it’s a conspiracy. It really sounds to me like you can’t let some things that have happened in the past go. What Matt did and the decisions he made in the past are all logged, in fact I think they might even be in the Wikipedia article. He has certainly learned from those mistakes and from what I’ve read, others have to.
What is the agenda behind your continous blast from the past bashing?
i think social networking is a feature to be built around/complement a business model.
I think blogging is maturing more than declining. For every blog I’ve seen end, 10 more have popped up in its place. I do think integration is the key to the future. With so many social sites fighting for dominance, it is extremely hard to keep up with all of them. Being able to pick & choose who gets what info will be the ultimate winner, IMHO. A unified approach is much more workable and will keep a strong user base.
I like twitter and use it daily. While it has affected my blogging, it hasn’t overtaken or even discouraged me from blogging. If anything, I find more of my trivial updates go to twitter now instead of my blog. Probably a good thing.
I like the word press. Its just really slow when you try to use it. I’ll pay more if you offer a faster version.
looks like you had fun at The Next Web Robin, good!
Matt is always ready to answers questions. I remember one thing he doesnt like to talk about is, “When is this buddypress going to launch ? ”
lol ..
You got me there.
With the amount of people in the WordPress community contributing not only themes but plugins and such, WordPress can only grow larger and larger. There is something for just about anyone and the ease of using the blogging platform makes it a reason for it to succeed and reach more audiences.
@Matt Any plans on releasing the CSS Editor used on WordPress.com? It’d be nice to have for MU installs…
Yep still planning on it, keep an eye on my blog (ma.tt) for an announcement when it is.
Quick thought: Twitter will not get rid of blogging because people use Twitter to promote their blog. They go hand in hand.
good information .. success for you, thank you