The Stratius Blog

Worpress adds another jewel to their crown.

WordPress acquired PollDaddy this week. We recommended PollDaddy in a post on crowdsourcing back in August. We like both companies as they both offer free, quality online services that promote Web 2.0 interactivity anyone can use. With this purchase, we thought it was time to take a closer look at some of WordPress’ recent purchases of other small startups.

• Gravatar - Universal avatar service (aquired 10-18-07)
• Intense Debate - Threaded commenting (aquired 9-23-08)
• PollDaddy - Embeddable polls and surveys (aquired 10-15-08)

WordPress is looking out to the periphery of their industry and buying small niche companies that can add value to their product and diversify their service offerings.

This type of buying has worked out well for many companies in the past. Ebay recognized, a while back, that a little spin off company name PayPal had popped up as a product of their success. They moved to aquire PayPal, integrated it well within Ebay.com and benefited from PayPal’s increased usage across the internet.

Other ompanies, like Google and Apple, follow the same pattern as a matter of efficiency. They recognize that in today’s open online world, any kid in his garage or dorm room can have the next big idea, and usually does. Or, as it was in this case with PollDaddy, two guys from Ireland. Below is a sample of one of the Polldaddy polls. This one has a basic style, but there are many other looks and options available.

Gravatar and PollDaddy have already been integrated into the base WordPress platform and Intense Debate is soon to follow. I think all three add great value to WordPress and, similar to their anti-spam technology Akismet, all three offer them the ability to provide each service through other blogging platforms. This extends WordPress as a leader in their industry’s technology and gives them even more ways to reach more users.

Are there any other blogging related services out there that WordPress should be buying?