Matt Mullenweg Interview: The Future of WordPress – Interviewed by: John Battelle
TL;DR
Matt is awesome, WordPress is awesome, Jetpack is launched, Guided Transfer to move from WordPress.com to your own host, I am a total fangirl.
(note: these notes are pretty disjointed, was busy taking it all in!)
12% of sites are powered by WordPress.
Blogging isn’t dead, it’s just changing
Mullenweg about tumblr – (paraphrased) some will say it’s all porn, but it’s artistic.
Tumblr is a different product, with a different focus. It integrates the reading/writing process in a beautiful way. WordPress should do more of that.
WordPress.com is made to be a consumer service – for people who don’t want to deal with the plugins, etc.
Interviewer – “You do seem to make money with advertising, but you seem to hate it.”
Originally how the ads worked is they would only be served to people who were coming from google, had never been to WordPress.com before, and were not on Firefox.
Question: Any ideas how to change the monetization of WordPress? Promoted posts like Twitter? Promoted accounts like Tumblr?
Answer: WordPress is very sensitive to putting things on people’s blogs. There is a little more room on pages that feature collected posts on a theme, because you are not messing with people’s personal style or infringing on their space.
They do monetize by providing value for the users – with things like premium themes, etc.
Jetpack launch!
Jetpack is a new plugin which aggregates some features which were available previously in seperate plugins, and brings features from the WordPress.com site to the .org site, like analytics and a math markup language. The goal is to have 100% feature parity between WordPress.com and self hosting users.
Guided transfer lanch!
Guided Transfer is a service which costs $99 and will help the user leave WordPress.com to their own guided host.
Business model: “We make a good thing, tell people about it, people give us money.”
Mullenweg was born and raised in Houston. Was in a linux user’s group and a palm users group there.
How the WordPress business works:
There are 80 people around the globe, the most people in any one place it 5. They use very little email, but use IRC for chat, and the P2 theme (for WordPress, duh) to keep track of projects. It has sort of a twitter/friendfeed feel. They have more P2 installs than they have employees. Superior to email because it is archivable and searchable. Great for catching new people up on the projects.
Question: Are there enterprise solutions? Pay for a certain level of uptime?
Answer: They already do this. WordPress.com powers some of the largest sites in the world – CNN, lolcats, time magazine
Question: What separates the entrepreneurs who make it?
Answer: Are you willing to outwork everyone else?
Question: What would Matt like to see in WordPress?
Answer: Handle media better. There is already a full screen writing mode for the visual editor (see pic below) , but Matt would like to improve even more.
Wants to continue to put authors first.
Question: Are there any plans to make podcasting better?
Answer: This will continue to be handled by plugins, and WordPress will continue to provide the hooks to make it work.
Question: Will you make it easier to livestream?
Answer: Matt recommends picking up a WordPress theming book and get skinning. You can use categories to distinguish livestreaming entries. “Scripting is a new literacy.”
Question: When will you make the iPhone app better?
Answer: It will continually get better, along with the blackberry, android, etc. apps. These are like nothing WordPress has worked on before, there are 5 different codebases. Also, people don’t like to contribute to closed platforms, so they are not getting the open source community help they do with other stuff.
Question: Is there any plan for plugin consistency?
Answer: This is hard because the plugin makers have leeway. But there is a UI group where plugin makers can ask about the best place to put things.
Updates are still not as easy as Matt would like. Working to make it better.