On my left side: Matt Mullenweg:
- Matt was born in 1984 in Houston, Texas.
- Amongst other things (see below) Matt is a passionate photographer.
- In Jan 2003, unhappy with the capabilities of B2/Cafelog, he starts with the development of what will grow to be the hottest blog platform software around: WordPress.
- In October 2004 he moves from Houston to San Francisco to work for CNET on, amongst other things, WordPress.
- In October 2005, he leaves CNET too concentrate on WordPress and also launches Akismet, a (comment/trackback) spam detection platform (with plugins for e.g. WordPress).
- In November 2005 Matt launches WordPress.com, the (free) hosted WordPress provider.
- In Dec 2005 Matt annouces the creation of AutoMattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet.
- Matt is cited as #16 on PCWorld’s list of “50 Most Important People on the Web”
At my right hand: Dries Buytaert:
- Dries is born in 1978, in Belgium.
- Amongst other things (see below), Dries is a passionate photographer.
- Grown out of a small-scale bulletin board experiment, Drupal is released as open-source CMS in Jan 2001. Dries is and will remain lead developer and ultimate-veto-editor-in-chief.
- In Nov 2007 Dries starts Acquia, “a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux“
- Dries becomes Dr. Buytaert in Jan 2008
- Acquia launches its Mollom service, a spam detection platform (with plugins for e.g. Drupal)
- In April 2008 Dries is cited as one of BusinessWeek’s Young Entrepreneurs of Tech
I especially like the ‘spam detection’ detail. If this is the main concern of two of the leading CMS platforms, you can imagine spam is a real problem.
If we extrapolate on the previous similarities, we could expect:
- something like Drupal.com – a freemium hosted Drupal provider. The free version gives you an instant xyz.drupal.com site with some standard themes (layouts) and plugins. If you want your own domain, or a custom layout, you will have to pay.
- a Mollom plugin for WordPress – because there is already an Akismet plugin for Drupal
- WordPress starts releasing ‘distributions’: a special version for e.g. NGO’s, for schools, for music groups. This distribution will contain the latest core of WordPress with some plugins, themes, widgets, pages … pre-installed.
In any case, I admire both guys and hope they continue to successfully lead some of the most promising web software platforms around.
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What’s funny is I think that picture of me was taken by Dries! He’s a great photographer, and I’m looking forward to seeing where his companies evolve. I think we share a lot of the same philosophies.
Both projects and leaders are so damn good that I live in a permanent schizophrenia trying to decide which one is better and more entertaining.
What would happen if you put these two guys together?
Just pointing out real quick that Mollom is not an Acquia company. Dries founded Mollom prior to Acquia, separate from it, and with an un-Acquia-related co-founder. For more info, check out this FAQ:
http://mollom.com/faq#company
About the plugin for WordPress: just released a new version:
http://www.netsensei.nl/mollom/