Automattic Acquires PollDaddy
It is now much easier to add polls to your managed (WordPress.com) or self-hosted (WordPress.org) blog, as Automattic, the parent company of WordPress and several other blogging-oriented subsidiaries and platforms, has acquired PollDaddy.
The deal will include an integration between the two main services, making the 30-person Automattic team the controller of how the PollDaddy works with its blogs, rather than the previous 2-person team of Lenny and Eoin. As of now, you will be able to add the plugin/poll to your blog – on more than 4.4 million blogs and the relatively large number of users on the self-hosted platform.
To date, more than one million polls have been created and more than 195 million votes have been collected, making it one of the leading polling sites, plus a majority of the users are bloggers and using WordPress.
For current users, those not apart of the WordPress community, the change will be even less drastic. The service will be moved over to the Automattic data centers, making the load faster, and cross-site use will be improved, for users of Ning, MySpace, Blogger, TypePad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, and others.
Matt states the following reasons why PollDaddy was the smart move on the part of Automattic (from blog):
For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I’ve also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.
As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.
While it may appear as though WordPress is trying to snag many companies that aren’t quite as popular as the blog platform itself, these acquisitions will allow the team to use the code to build upon its existing plugins and feature set available to its users.
In Brief
WordPress.com Users
- A new icon has been added next to the “Add Media” section.
- Now available to more than 4.4 million users.
- Additional styles coming soon for better integration.
- Easily add polls to your blog.
Video Displaying How to Use this Version:
WordPress.org Users
- Plugin now available; currently requires version 2.6 or higher of WordPress.
- Possibly customizable by using your account or changing the stylesheet.
- Makes it easy to add polls to your site.
Previous PollDaddy Users
- No major changes.
- Faster speeds and new features will be slowly integrated.
- Pricing (Pro Annual and Pro 2 Annual, $200 and $899/year, respectively) likely won’t be removed due to the expensive costs of hosting, support, features, etc.
Links:
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