Automattic, maker of the WordPress blogging platform, has announced the acquisition of PollDaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets. The deal apparently follows an integration project between the two companies, featuring a PollDaddy plugin for WordPress.org blogs as well as an integration within the editor on WordPress.com. Both products are immediately available following today’s news.
Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, offered the following comment on his blog: “As we started to look at building out our own service for [polls and surveys], 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.”
As for PollDaddy, the two-man team will join Automattic and continue working on the product, with plans to continue to serve polling applications to platforms beyond WordPress. From their announcement: “We are still 100% focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow.”
The Automattic-PollDaddy deal follows news last month that Automattic was buying IntenseDebate, makers of a popular third-party commenting plugin. Last year, Automattic also bought Gravatar, a service for maintaining the same avatar in your comments across blogs.
As I mentioned back when Automattic acquired IntenseDebate, it makes a lot of sense for the company to scoop up startups that feed into their ecosystem. Like IntenseDebate, PollDaddy instantly has added millions of members, who can in turn begin using the software not only on WordPress blogs, but on all of the other services that PollDaddy supports. Meanwhile, more broadly, it would appear that the startups with money (Automattic raised nearly $30 million recently) are going to aggressively scoop up those with limited prospects for survival during the current economic and venture capital crunch.
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