Having said that, Mullenweg believes that if he had to do it all again starting in 2010 he would do it differently.
“The trajectory (of WordPress) would look very different because the software world is different now. The blog market is more saturated and social tools are a lot more important so, yeah, maybe it would look different and maybe one of the first features I’d build in would be a Facebook integration or something like that, whereas five or six years ago this wasn’t even on anybody’s mind.”
Source – SiliconRepublic There’s life in the old blog yet
Overall, a great writeup of Matts keynote presentation at the Web summit that was recently held in Dublin, Ireland. Blogging is not dead and it won’t die for a considerable amount of time, if ever. I think Matt hits the nail on the head.
“Ultimately, it is on their own domain, which is something they own and control in perpetuity no matter what Facebook, Google or Twitter does. That is always going to valuable.”
I also found this part of the article quite interesting. I’m sure some of you might disagree but I think in the bigger picture, what Matt says is true.
As an open-source platform Mullenweg says that WordPress’ innovation is driven by staying close to the community and listening to people.
“Sometimes they’ll tell us if they are really passionate about a feature or functionality and we start to think about the best way to do that. It’s something I think about a lot – we are mostly driven by the same things our users ask for.”
It’s difficult to wonder what could have been, because without WordPress there wouldn’t have been certain innovations happening – but they could still have happened through other systems. So it’s questionable to wonder how big WP would become if it were a project starting out now instead of an existing project with it’s userbase and a bright horizon of rewrites and optimizations in future versions. I’d say the second isn’t the ideal option, but hey – everything starts somewhere.