Future of Web Apps – Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg from WordPress was the last speaker and being the last is always hard. He seems to be good at presentations and really kept the audience engaged. Here are my notes from his presentation.

Stats on WordPress Downloads

• Version 1.2 – 822/day
• Version 1.5 – 2500/day
• Version 2.0 – 5115/day – 1.1 million total downloads

Some Misc. Matt Comments

• He removed Sourceforge because it took too many clicks to download
• Mmore eyes = better software
• Plugins are vital
• Apis are important, breaking them is worse than never having any at all
• Plugins vs core = no, core needs to be beefy, address 90%, let plugins handle the balance
• Do your own support — helped him to lern that multiblogs were really a need for about page
• What sucks now — should have provided an aggregation for plugins and themes
• If you want to succeed – be a painkiller not a vitamin

WordPress Lessons Learned

• all hosting sux
• no such thing as a 100% sla
• no such thing as redundant networks and power
• make backups constantly
• buy the cheapest hardware possible – IF – you can stay up when it goes down
• make it easy to contact you

What sucks at WordPress.com today

• no feature list
• no tutorials
• no documentation
• copywriting needs to be better 

Akismet – his new product – a spam tool that learns from each reported spam

• created a developer api
• 20+ implementations from ruby to lasso
• scalable business
• social software

What does Matt see for the future for web apps

• global
• personal
• useful
• humble – frame it for you not we

Final thoughts from Matt

• most importantly build for yourself
• working for someone else is dead
• never say can't
• never forget how lucky you are – and dont waste it

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