Elliott C. Back

Wordpress And Automattic: A Sinister Pair

Posted in Blogging, Computers & Technology, Wordpress by Elliott Back on June 26th, 2006.

Following the recent announcement of a Support Network from the commercial arm of Wordpress, Automattic, I’ve decide to co-brand the two companies:

On the face of things, for the Wordpress developers to sell tiered support for their free open source product sounds like a great idea. For a mere $5,000 a year you get priority access to the Wordpress developers for support with performance issues, plugins, and spam. There are private forums for your questions, a six hour SLA for questions, all kinds of other cushy support services.

However, there are a few problems.

Support for non-Automattic members

With paid support now occupying developers’ time, what will happen to the existing support forums? It’s unreasonable to assume that when Wordpress developers are busy answer paid questions that they will continue to share time with the free public forums. And, few bloggers have the money to spend on a $5,000 subscription to paid support. The average individual will expect Wordpress to work perfectly for them out of the box; when that doesn’t happen they shouldn’t be forking out money, the developers should be fixing bugs.

A Focus on Wordpress development

With their time tied up helping new paying customers on the Automattic platform install and configure Wordpress, how much new development will go on? It’s obviously true that Wordpress is by no means a “finished” project. Only continued evolution will propel it above new platforms like Typo.

The Bugs Clause

What bothers me most about the paid support is their bug fix clause:

If the problem you are reporting is caused by a bug in the WordPress software, we will assign a priority level to it which determines how soon the bug will be fixed. Level A = the bug causes the software to completely break: we will start fixing it within 24 hours and will get you a custom fix to the problem ASAP. Level B = the bug degrades the performance of the software but a work-around exists: we will fix the bug in the next scheduled release of the software. Level C = the bug has a minor impact on the software: we may fix the bug in the next release.

In other words, subscribers to the Wordpress Support Network are acting as expensive beta testers. Unlike a commercial software company which attemps to ship a bug-free product, Wordpress releases typically contain numerous bugs which are only later fixed. And, by joining the Support Network, you are facilitating a ship-now patch-later software development model which prioritizes the company’s pockets over end users.

Other Opinions

That said, I still love you, Matt & Wordpress!

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Digg 3.0: Too Heavy

Posted in Adsense, Computers & Technology, Web 2.0 by Elliott Back on June 26th, 2006.

Digg just launched a redesign. They’ve got new topics, like Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment, and Gaming. They’ve got a new design that shows both the dugg stories and the stories in the queue on the same page:

Their new adsense ads are a bit interesting, too:

Note the prominent green color! What bothers me, though, is that the new layout is too heavy. Now it’s just a tech news site, it’s an everything news site. There’s a bar on the left to filter information, tabs on the right, tabs on the top, friends on the left. It’s like Digg just asked the question, “Where can we fit all our features in” and placed them haphazardly everywhere.

One good feature, though, is their new “bury a story” interface, where the stories you report turn grey in front of your eyes, and become one with the background: