In its biggest acquisition to date, Automattic Inc. has purchased Tumblr along with its 200 employees.
Automattic CEO, Matt Mullenweg told the Wall Street Journal that executives will try to find ways to merge Tumblr’s functionality with WordPress.com’s.
According to Post Status, Mullenweg’s initial goals for the website are to:
1. Move infrastructure off Verizon.
2. Support same APIs on both WP.com and Tumblr.
3. Switch backend to be WP.
4. Open source Tumblr.com client similar to Calypso.
He went on to say that though there will be changes to the backend, the front-end user experience will stay the same as it is today. Because Tumblr has a large and committed community, it will remain a separate brand.
Automattic acquired Tumblr from Verizon, which found itself under scrutiny after implementing a ban on “adult content” from the site. Mullenweg told the Wall Street Journal he will uphold that policy.
In a 2013 blog post, Mullenweg talked about Verizon purchasing Tumblr saying, “Tumblr’s own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there’s healthy import and export traffic both ways.”
Mullenweg himself remains active on Tumblr and has been updating his site for 12 years.
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