{"id":2264,"date":"2008-03-04T20:20:30","date_gmt":"2008-03-05T01:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/03\/04\/wordpress-going-after-ningcom\/"},"modified":"2008-03-04T20:20:30","modified_gmt":"2008-03-05T01:20:30","slug":"wordpress-going-after-ningcom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/03\/04\/wordpress-going-after-ningcom\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress: Going after Ning.com?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m still technically on vacation in Florida as I type this, but it’s raining outside and I can’t help but post something on the news that Automattic — the parent company of WordPress — has acquired Buddypress, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg describes on his blog.<\/a> It’s not so much that this is a huge deal, since it clearly isn’t. Buddypress was the one-man project of Andy Peatling, who took a version of WordPress MU (multi-user) and modified it to turn it into Chickspeak.com.<\/p>\n

But nevertheless, I find it interesting because of what it says about where WordPress is going. Not only did the company just finish raising a boatload of cash, with the New York Times as an investor (which I wrote about here<\/a>) but Matt has clearly gotten religion about the future of online media being social, and I think building on what Andy did with WordPress MU is his way of helping to make that happen.<\/p>\n

If you take a look at Chickspeak, it looks very much like the kind of social network that Ning.com helps people build (I’m a member of a couple of Ning-powered social networks, including Social News Central<\/a> and Wired Journalists<\/a>), and Andy Peatling put it together by basically hacking a WordPress theme and plugging BBPress into it for user forums. And from Matt’s post, he appears to see that as a potential solution to the numerous social-network silos that are out there. <\/p>\n

“Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, from the sounds of it, Matt doesn’t just want to take on Ning — he wants to go after Facebook as well, but with an open platform rather than another closed network (check the quote he gave<\/a> Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch about “digital sharecropping” for other networks). More power to him, I say. It’s something others are also thinking about, including Chris “Factory Joe” Messina and his DiSo project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m still technically on vacation in Florida as I type this, but it’s raining outside and I can’t help but post something on the news that Automattic — the parent company of WordPress — has acquired Buddypress, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg describes on his blog. It’s not so much that this is a huge … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “WordPress: Going after Ning.com?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}