Matt Mullenweg is the developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress and Akismet, products of his company Automattic and he writes on his photoblog Photo Matt. Email
Where do we go from here?
Before wordpress there was Open Diary, Livejournal, Pitas, Xanga, Blogger and Movable Type. B2 was an open source software the Matt built from. Five years and Wordpress 7,226,049 downloads after, here we are.
What do bloggers want?
Blogger's Hierarchy of Needs, Broadly. What are the fundamentals?
1. Expression - online presence to represent themselves. He analogized this with 1000 stickers in one's school locker and how that changed to ''stickers'' on one's MySpace page. Through WordPress, users can change their designs with a click of a button at what now looks like at the rate of once a second. Themes make the difference. If you compare this with Facebook's features, the personal photos make the difference [along with its spam and trouble free email]
2. Public - sharing with people. Matt suggests that "Interaction should be the default mode rather than privacy." Anything that increases the interaction and make it easy to connect and follow can have exponential increase in growth.
3. Validation - Matt says "People check their stats like crack addled gerbils."
4. Form Dictates Writing - Example: Trackback changed the way how people use the medium. Minimalism has its value. Example is tumblr or prologue. The upcoming Wordpress 2.5 will be simpler
Exhortation #1
~ Need to remove the friction
~ We need invisible software - we should remove the challenges of the medium as it prevents us from being creating content
~ Volume of postings is going to blow all predictions - Example: 4M is the number of posts created on Wordpress every month. Compare this to Wikipedia with 2.1M articles a month.
A small slice - we need to filter things to make things relevant to us so we need more social filters. On the side... make sure you don't say Wordpress but WordPress and not photomatt.net but ma.tt
Achilles Heel of Web 2.0 - spam is the online version of terrorists. Spams are just bad actors. People are moving away from MySpace because of that. Requests for apps is spam in Facebook for example. Anything that takes our attention away is spam. Most valuable is your mind-share.
Matt's Exhortation #2
We have to respect people`s time
Users create a lot of value. We need to make advertising a bit more discrete. We lose where the content is located when its cluttered with ads. We may even accidentally click an ad instead of the content we went to that site for. Advertising needs to evolve.
Matt's Exhortation #3
Kill the megabrands. Age of portals is over. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are the big three. Our websites need to evolve much like how Yahoo has flickr. Read Dana Boyd's blog for further info on this.
Matt`s Third Law of Social Media - Unfiltered interaction is worse than useless at scale. Example of this is Google`s respect for their users by having fewer ads.
Social Objects Connections is the first social objects rule. Let`s look at the following sites: Flickr photos. Delicious tags. YouTube videos. If the comments on YouTube videos are removed, do you think its popularity gets affected? No. We just need to have more filters so the idea of ``connections as a social objects rule`` extends its value. How to do this in relation to comments? Maybe see comments from our friends, from people we like to see comments from, from people who view similar videos, then it will be more important to us right? By being able to slice and dice the comments, then connections are stregthened.
Open Source
All the things we talked about are meaningful in the next few years.
There are four fundamental freedoms of open source:
0. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
1. The freedome to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
3. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Ask not what your software can do for you...
The taste of freedom - once you have experienced it, its hard to go back. Once you`ve experienced transparency of open source then its hard to go back. What if there is a wiki for any law that is built on? Isn`t that transparency very powerful? Creating better alternatives is the option.
