I’m happy to see that Automattic has been able to acquire WP.com, from Yahoo incidentally, who also sold the blo.gs domain to the creators of WordPress and Akismet not so long ago. Matt is thrilled, and rumor has it* that he spent a full day just typing in wp.com and watching it resolve to wordpress.com (*not confirmed).
Naturally, he blogged it as well, on the WordPress.com blog, asking the world what they should do with the new domain, and urging people to make suggestions in the comments.
My reaction to that: Whaaat?!?!
Are you mad?
There is one, and I do mean one (1), real issue with Automattic’s WordPress strategy today, and that is the confusion between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. They know it, otherwise they wouldn’t be preparing to use talkpress.com for their hosted/premium forum services based on bbPress. Yes, I know that bbpress.com is owned by someone else, but I’m sure that could’ve been resolved if they really wanted to.
Users are having a hard time understanding the difference between WordPress and WordPress. I keep getting questions about how to do this or that for their WordPress blog, and “why can’t I ping that service?” and so on. Because far from all WordPress users that are looking to enhance their blogs understand that they are using the hosted version – wordpress.com – and not the stand-alone one, of course being wordpress.org.
You know what you have to do, Automattic, and I’ll spell it out for you just so we’re really really clear on this.
Rebrand wordpress.com to wp.com.
Now please.
