Thursday, October 16, 2008

Automattic Integrates PollDaddy to Enhance WordPress Services

As small businesses struggle to stay afloat in a suffocating economic environment, some will manage to survive, but the most efficient ones will thrive and leverage their most valuable assets to established developers and prominent corporations that are in expansion mode, not downsizing.
A perfect example of one of those efficient ones is PollDaddy. PollDaddy was started by two entrepenuers in Ireland 2005. Since that time, they've grown to provide widgets to over 500,000 users.Automattic, (the developer of Wordpress), noticed PollDaddy's agility and exponential growth and added PollDaddy as one if its companies. PollDaddy is now integrated as the newest feature on WordPress.

How did PollDaddy attract Automattic's offer? By building its brand with distinguishing characteristics that separated them from the rest of the pack.
Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, knew that an interactive poll was a feature WordPress needed to address, but he viewed it as an obvious problem with a complex solution.

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.Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren’t the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space. I took a secret trip to Sligo and put back a few pints with the team and we decided to make things work. They went to bed every night and woke up every morning thinking about polls and surveys, and were iterating at a great pace....I knew we could take Polldaddy to an entirely new level in a relatively short amount of time.

One example is the PollDaddy Junior , a versatile widget that can be applied to a variety social networks, including MySpace and Friendster.Today, WordPress' homepage features a gleeful announcement about the addition of PollDaddy.

Now whenever you do a post you’ll be a few clicks away from having your own poll, and you can have as many as you like! We’re also going to be working on a lot more styles and customization of the polls, so you’ll be able to match it exactly to the look and feel of your blog.

WordPress showcased PollDaddy's feature with a poll on polls - "Do you like polls?" (How is that for redundancy>). As of 11 a.m., the results showed 85% yes, 17% no.

One of the latest innovations is PollDaddy answers, where you can analyze previous polls that have been created. It's still in the Beta stage of development will continue to add more features during the next few months.Now that PollDaddy is available on a blogging platform with 4.5 million subscribers, it's become an ideal model for small business that are searching for the best method to pitch their outstanding product or service.

By Matt O'Hern at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

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