WordPress Goes Social By Acquiring BuddyPress
March 5th, 2008 (8:42am) Jason Harris 3 Comments
Last December, our own Anne Zelenka posted about the social possibilities WordPress presented. Apparently Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic (the company behind WordPress) agreed with Anne.
In a blog post, Mullenweg announced that Automattic is acquiring BuddyPress and the designer and developer behind it, Andy Peating. BuddyPress is a series of WordPress plug-ins that can take a WordPress MU (multiple WordPress weblogs on one single server) website and turn it into a social network platform.
What can BuddyPress practically be used for? Say you have a group of co-workers or team mates and you want to have a social environment to exchange ideas and information with. You don’t want to have to force everyone to sign up for FaceBook or MySpace, you simply want to collaborate. WordPress, combined with BuddyPress will give you a space to connect with your cohorts outside of the ‘walled-garden‘ of these other social networking sites.
It will be great to see what comes out of the acquisition. WordPress holds a high degree of promise as a content management system, and with the load of venture funding Automattic attracted recently, more great developments are sure to manifest.
3 Comments Post your own comment
nortypig » Blog Archive » WordPress Acquiring BuddyPress says: March 5th, 2008 12:57pm
[...] is acquiring BuddyPress, Web Worker Daily reports. This will give you a space to connect with your cohorts outside of the ‘walled-garden‘ of [...]
Thoughts on the internet. | leecoursey.net Development Blog says: March 6th, 2008 4:36am
[...] thoughts probably aren’t as completely connected in your head as the are in mine, but with WordPress’ acquisition of BuddyPress I wanted to put out there again that it might be time to re-think the format of [...]
Great says: March 20th, 2008 8:43am
Another social network…
Egads … will they ever stop? I mean we have one for dog lovers (dogster), one where you send your friends’ wake up messages (Sleep.FM) and for ParrotHeads (meetthephlockers). Havent some of these developers heard of Ning. A few mentioned could be made on Ning!