A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg

What do you do if you have a chunk of time slotted to hang out and talk with the creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic? You do what everyone else does in the Web 2.0 world - you talk about Twitter!

This Friday past, Matt took some time out to hang out on Mashable Conversations to chat with me and you guys, not because he had anything to pitch me, but because he's a genuinely nice guy who when he says offhandedly at a WordCamp that he wouldn't mind coming on your podcast at some point, gladly obliges.

Given that we had no particular agenda of topics to talk about, we chatted briefly about what's in store for the next version of WordPress (here's a hint - WordPress is going to be tackling video in their next version, and from the sounds of it will be an ambitious undertaking), and then I went down the laundry list of hot topics in the blogosphere at the moment.

I didn't bring up Twitter just for the sake of talking about it - a while back, Matt announced the release of a special theme for WordPress called Prolouge, which we covered here at Mashable. The idea behind the release was to provide small to mid-sized teams a way to have Twitter functionality without putting the company business out there for the world to see.  It's a great idea that they not only gave to the world, but use themselves internally at Automattic.

In the release blog, though, Matt had made an interesting statement about the theme:

Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to.

I tried to pin down with him what he thought the feasibility of this plan was, and the likelyhood of it coming about given the chronic downtime Twitter has been experiencing lately.

The biggest problem that Twitter has experienced, with regard to it being down all the time, is generally regarded as it's scalability problem.  This is an area that Matt could speak to with some authority, as WordPress has climbed the various Mt. Everests in terms of high usage situations, and generally weathered all the adventure without a hitch.

Aside from the Twitter topic, we also talked about the future of blog content, RSS, comment fragmentation, and how much he loves his Kindle (in which I took the opportunity to shamelessly appeal to Jeff Bezos, Mashable Conversations Listener, to send me a review unit).

It's definitely a riveting conversation top to bottom. Whether you're a WordPress user or just a user of the Web, the conversation is definitely interesting.