For the record: I love WordPress ever since I started using it which was not long after WordPress.com went public. WordPress.com has evolved quite a lot over time and added many new features which were always nice to discover. That has changed a little the last few weeks if you ask me.
I wrote earlier about Akismet losing its edge but that seemed to have been just a hickup like Matt confirmed in the comments. For the blogs on WordPress.com at least, all went back to normal which is good.
At the time that WordPress.com started with the system of upgrades I thought they had found the ideal road between the ‘old’ WordPress.com and the self hosted version. They added things such as domain support, custom CSS or extra GB space upgrades. And all of this for a few credits (or dollars) only. This is an interesting concept and offers users such as myself the ability to tune this blog a bit more without having to go ‘all the way’ by hosting it all myself. I don’t want to host myself as it offers an extra set of questions and issues that I don’t even want to think about.
Now instead of continuing that way, I get the feeling they changed strategy and I don’t really understand why. Two weeks ago they added WordPress Video which would allow you to host Videos on WordPress and use their native player. Now why would I use that? Why didn’t they just add support for existing video services (next to YouTube, Google Video and Dailymotion that they support right now). Think of Soapbox, Revver, …
Today WordPress.com stopped their feed stats feature (or at least put it on hold) because they didn’t feel it was totally right (it was beta so I’m ok with that) and it wasn’t used enough apparently. And although I’ll miss that I can somehow relate to this decision, I like it when people don’t just launch stuff, when they want it to be good. But my question would be: why not offer another solution then? Looking at the ‘upgrade strategy’ you could easily implement an upgrade by which people could replace the default WordPress RSS feed by a Feedburner feed for instance… and yes I would buy 15 credits for that.
I think WordPress.com made a very good decision with these upgrades and they should get back to that strategy if you ask me. I’ll pay to integrate another RSS feed, I’ll pay to be able to add a Javascript widget to the sidebar that allows me to integrate some more advanced widgets. Why? Because I want to do more with my blog than I do today, because I want to keep on testing new stuff out there but I don’t want to host this all myself. Think about this for a second. If they would allow advertising on WordPress.com in a revenue sharing model they could actually make some good money off it and it would make us all even more addicted to WordPress than we are today.
My 2 cents. Matt?
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I hear you. I miss the stats too, and am almost on edge for ANYTHING new they can offer me…free or upgrade. I’ll make the jump to self-hosted someday after I learn CSS much better…but that’s a while away.
Hey Mario – I had hoped to hear something from WordPress about this, just like Matt reacted on an earlier post about Akismet, but no luck there. I’m really curious to find out though where they’re heading with this. By the time I’ve learned CSS… :)