Tag Archives: automattic

USC Talk & a surprise about Snapchat usage

I gave a talk at USC earlier this week about Automattic and WordPress — something I’ve done for 3 years in a row now.

It’s always a ton of fun, and I make sure to do a survey (by show of hands) each time to see what these undergrad & grad students are using in terms of popular services.

Here are the results:
- WordPress: about 75%+ use WordPress in some capacity
- Facebook: 100%
- Twitter: about 75%
- Tumblr: 33%
- Note taking: Evernote vs Simplenote vs Pen & Paper: About 33% Evernote, the rest a combination of email, other apps, or nothing. And one person still using a pen & paper.
- iOS vs Android: 75% iOS, 25% Android
- SMS vs GroupMe vs MessageMe vs Snapchat: SMS still used by everyone, but the surprise here was Snapchat being used by over 50% of the class.

I asked the obvious question of what they were using Snapchat for – and the answer was that it was just a free SMS-like service, easy to send media, works all over the world and w/ friends overseas — and basically that everyone is on it. Was pretty clear it’s moved beyond the salacious roots (or at least how it was covered early on).

So a big thanks to Zach Posner for having me, and for his entire class for engaging in a really fun and interesting discussion – appreciate the tweets and Instagrams too :)

Thanks for the awesome #wordpress presentation at #APOC2013, @raanan!

5 Years at Automattic

Thanks to my wonderful colleague Mo who reminded that I’ve now been @ Automattic for 5 years !

I can’t imagine having a better job and a better set of colleagues to work with — I’m looking forward to the next 5 years.

And as I did after my one year anniversary, here are some fun stats to look at:

Biggest traffic day:
May/June 2007 – 8 million pageviews
May/June 2008 – 35 million pageviews
May/June 2012 – 130 million pageviews

Number of blogs on WordPress.com:
May/June 2007 – A bit over 1 million
May/June 2008 – 3.3 million
May/June 2012 – 32+ million

Unique Monthly Visitors to WordPress.com:
May/June 2007 – 40 million
May/June 2008 – 168 million
May/June 2012 – Over 350 million

DataSF.org

We (Automattic) hosted an event today with Mayor Gavin Newsom for the beta launch of DataSF.org.

Really smart initiative around providing public data to the citizens of San Francisco:

The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format. For example, there will be updated crime incident data from the police department and restaurant inspection data from the Department of Public Health. The initial phase of the web site includes more than 100 datasets, from a range of city departments, including Police, Public Works, and the Municipal Transportation Agency

[more on TechCrunch.com]

The Mayor, Matt Mullenweg, and Tim O’Reilly all spoke about the need and benefit of Open Source and Open Data. I’m exited to help and see how this progresses.

Here is a quick pic from a few minutes ago:

Gavin Newsom, Matt Mullenweg, and Tim O'Reilly at Automattic Lounge

Gavin Newsom, Matt Mullenweg, and Tim O'Reilly at Automattic Lounge

Working Automattic Style

Great piece in this month’s Inc. magazine by Matt: “The Way I Work: Matt Mullenweg”:

I travel a lot, but when I’m in San Francisco, I usually work from home. Everyone else works from home, too. We’re a virtual company. We recently got an office on Pier 38, a five-minute walk from my apartment. I’ll go to there once a week, usually Thursdays, and for board meetings, which happen about once every two months. We leased it so we wouldn’t have to keep borrowing conference rooms from our VC partners. It’s kind of sad; we have this great space right on the water — and six days a week, it’s empty. Of the 40 people working for the company, eight are in the Bay Area, but that’s just a coincidence. They could be anywhere in the world.

We all communicate using P2, something we launched that allows users to publish group blogs in WordPress. It’s a bit like Twitter, but the updates come in real time. With P2, we can share code and ideas instantly. There is a dedicated channel for each part of the company, and when there’s a new message, it shows up in red. It may be someone talking about development or what he or she had for breakfast. I also use Skype for one-on-one and mini group chats.

In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors — a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I’ll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC. I also have a laptop, which I have with me all the time, whether I’m going overseas or to the doctor’s office. I’m pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year. I keep a server for my home network in the closet. I really enjoy computer networking. I sometimes do tech support for our employees who live in the Bay Area.

I know people I talk to are always fascinated by our organization and how we are setup and completely virtual. This piece provides a few more good insights as to how it all works.

New WordPress.com Dashboard Live !

I’m writing this post from the all new WordPress.com dashboard.  If you are on WordPress.com, go check it out.  For those of you on self-hosted WordPress, the new UI will be part of the 2.7 release which is due out next week, and you can download 2.7 RC1 now and auto-update to the final version when it’s out ( auto-updating of the core is a new feature in 2.7 ).

I’m biased — but this new UI is simply breathtaking and clairvoyant in it’s intuitiveness — how you would expect to do things is now how things are done — a very zen-like experience !  And the feedback pouring in from bloggers on WordPress.com has been very positive.

And just a quick word on the pure launch logistics last night on WordPress.com – simply amazing.   When you take into consideration that we are completely virtual company and in multiple countries, a relatively small team, run a service in multiple data centers with nearly 5 million blogs, and you look at the sheer amount of work and coordination that it took – not to mention the technical skill – it was a thing of pure beauty to watch it all come together.   Everything happened in real-time, there was no down-time maintenance window, no launch and revert and postpone, and no 5am all-hands meeting.  Just a group of rockstar colleagues working in sync and getting things done – really impressive.

PollDaddy

Exciting news – PollDaddy has joined the Automattic team.

The timing is great since the Automattic team is in the mountains of Colorado at our bi-annual company meetup, and we’ve all been able to get the know the talented PollDaddy team of Lenny and Eoin.

From my earlier days at TIME.com I’ve known that polls were huge and that readers loved particiapting.  This has been echoed in the WordPress world with very popular WordPress plugins for polls.  I’m including my quick poll here:

As Matt mentioned in his blog post, in terms of integration, “we just enabled PollDaddy with 4.4 million blogs on WordPress.com and have also released the first version of their .org plugin.”

Check out the screencast below for how to add a poll on WordPress.com:

WordPress.com and NFL

Found myself watching the Giants opening game today — and it was official work business:

Posted a few more details on the publisherblog.