The latest item on Automattic’s shopping list is PollDaddy, the hosted poll solution that apparently have served 195 million votes over some 1 million polls to date. The two man operation have joined Automattic, and PollDaddy polls are now hosted in the new owner’s powerful datacenter. Good for the stability of the service.
Matt Mullenweg explains why Automattic acquired PollDaddy:
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.
PollDaddy is now a part of the WordPress.com service, detailed here, and also available in a plugin for hosted WordPress installs. That adds to the current support of embedding polls, something that won’t change.
Buying PollDaddy makes sense for Automattic, polls being one of those online services that are always interesting for both publishers and users. It fits nicely with both the Gravatar deal and the more recent IntenseDebate one, for instance.
It also fits with Automattic’s strive to serve hosted solutions to various platforms, and not just WordPress. Just like with Akismet and IntenseDebate, PollDaddy will continue to work for other platforms, including ones competing with WordPress in the blogging game.
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