Automattic wants to be the king of texts

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The Future. Software company Automattic has acquired message-aggregation platform Texts, making messaging a central part of its business. With support for DMs becoming the hottest new trend in social media, Automattic could provide both an easy solution for managing various apps and a potential way to actually monetize private communication.

Universal message
The company behind WordPress, Tumblr, and Pocket Casts sees messaging as the latest frontier.

  • The company has acquired Texts — the platform that lets you respond to messages from iMessage, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, etc., all on one interface — in a $50 million deal.
  • The first order of business for Automattic is to finish Texts’ mobile app and chart the long-term consumer offering (right now, it’s a $15/month platform, but a free tier could be around the corner).

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says the purchase creates a “third pillar” for the company — joining publishing and commerce as areas he feels are “fundamental to the human condition” and where “an open-solution is necessary.” 

And with end-to-end encryption, Automattic can market that putting all your chats on one platform won’t compromise security. That’s an important factor as social networking gravitates towards becoming more private and message-based.

The future is all about saving it for the group text.

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