Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, offered the following comment on his blog: “As we started to look at building out our own service for [polls and surveys], it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. 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.”
As for PollDaddy, the two-man team will join Automattic and continue working on the product, with plans to continue to serve polling applications to platforms beyond WordPress. From their announcement: “We are still 100% focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow.”
The Automattic-PollDaddy deal follows news last month that Automattic was buying IntenseDebate, makers of a popular third-party commenting plugin. Last year, Automattic also bought Gravatar, a service for maintaining the same avatar in your comments across blogs.