blog.forret.com

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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