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?
Broad social networking is what most people think of when they think “social media”. Myspace has captured the attention of the world with its widespread adoption by young online users and could be credited with much of the rampant growth the social web enjoys today.
Publishing, sharing and the promotion of various media is the focus within the Social Publishing Sphere. This includes the large subcategory of blogging, specific media sites for sharing video or photos, and reference sites featuring community generated knowledge.
Sharing links to articles and other content, very often for promotion, is the priority of sites within the Social Linking Sphere. Many of these sites are referred to as “social book marking” sites, but this term looses accuracy since most of these sites are now geared towards sharing links or the promotion of content to other users as opposed to just saving them for later recall. Even a somewhat pure book marking site like Delicious.com is commonly used to promote links to others. Many of these sites utilize some type of accumulated voting value to promote the “most viewed” or “most liked” content for others to see.
Virtual, gaming, and crowdsourcing networks fill the Social Interactive Sphere. The focus of these networks is on dynamic interaction with others. The interactive portion can be a virtual 3D world that mimics our own, large gaming environments, or communities where users work together to solve problems and create goods and services.
Micro-focused networks that can really fall within or across many of the 5 spheres. Niche networks will begin to create much more valuable hyper-local online community content. But geography is just one section of niche. Site form around very unique interest from TV shows to sports and much more.
