Automattic Acquires Poll Daddy - Integrated Polls & Surveys for WordPress
Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, announced on his blog that Automattic has just acquired the company Poll Daddy, to shore up a lack of integrated polling functionality on the popular Open Source blogging platform1. According to Mullenweg, polling has become very popular with WordPress users, and there are over a dozen different companies developing polling plugins for the CMS. Yet, when looking at the top sites, the “Poll Daddy” functionality was most favored. Upon investigation, it turns out the company was run by two programmers in Ireland – Mullenweg traveled there, had a few beers with the crew, and acquired the company for Automattic.
Looking at the functionality of “Poll Daddy,” the main advantages are in its flexibility and ability to be customized. There are a number of skins available for the plugin, and developers can modify the display easily through CSS. HTML customizations can be used to add image, video, and multimedia files. Poll Daddy adds realtime data reporting from polls and surveys to a WordPress site, and the data can be exported through XML, RSS, or CSV. In setting up questions, there are over ten different formats to select from, which can be further configured in the control panel.
The use of conditional branching allows you to split surveys into different paths depending on the answers given by the user. Thus Poll Daddy allows you to create highly complex surveys on a WordPress site, and the pages themselves can be styled individually. Repeat visitors can be automatically blocked from retaking the poll using IP analysis tools, and with the “Pro” version, there are a lot more options for tracking and vote counting. Interestingly, Poll Daddy isn’t limited only to WordPress – it can also be integrated in other blogging software like Blogger and TypePad, as well as on social networking platforms.
There are three versions of Poll Daddy – Free, Pro, and Pro2. The biggest difference is when you pay for the software, the proprietary link to the developer’s website is removed. Other than that, you get support for more responses and questions per survey. The “Free” version only allows for 10 questions and 100 responses per month, which may be limiting to many. For reference, the “Pro” version upgrade is $200 per year and includes 1,000 survey responses per month plus unlimited questions, while the “Pro2” version is $899 per year with 10,000 survey responses. The two “Pro” versions also include tech support by phone.
The highest profile users of Poll Daddy are Wired, Fox, PC World, TechCrunch, and Read/Write Web. According to Mullenweg, the service has just been enabled for an additional 4.4 million blogs on wordpress.com. If you want to try out the plugin on a WordPress site hosted on your own servers, the download is available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/polldaddy/ and more information can be found at the Poll Daddy site.
Looking at the announcement on wordpress.com, there doesn’t seem to be a single negative comment from the community on this:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/polldaddy/
Where other Open Source projects are meandering currently, the constant improvement of WordPress through version upgrades and 3rd party acquisitions such as IntenseDebate and Poll Daddy show Automattic leading the CMS project in a great, new direction, building on the success and popularity of the platform to make it even better.