Matt Mullenweg (who, it must be said, has the coolest vanity domain evuh) has finally indulged his minor obsession with polls and surveys "as a method of lightweight
interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get
you some really fun data to play with", and acquired Irish start-up PollDaddy (or rather, Automattic has).

TechCrunch‘s Mark Hendrickson takes the view
that the highly decentralized Automattic is on something of a plugin
rollup spree, chronicling the company’s recent purchase of various
startups whose technology enriches the tools available to bloggers and
those who drink at the social media stream. He writes: "… we can
expect both companies’ efforts to be driven primarily
towards improving WordPress – both the open source version offered at WordPress.org, but even more importantly the hosted version at WordPress.com (with which Automattic can actually make money)."

Adam Ostrow at Mashable says: "…it makes a lot of sense for the company to scoop up startups that feed
into their ecosystem. Like IntenseDebate, PollDaddy instantly has added
millions of members, who can in turn begin using the software not only
on WordPress blogs, but on all of the other services that PollDaddy
supports. Meanwhile, more broadly, it would appear that the startups
with money (Automattic raised nearly $30 million
recently) are going to aggressively scoop up those with limited
prospects for survival during the current economic and venture capital
crunch."

For those feeling textually challenged, ReadWriteWeb has a short video of how the WordPress.com integration with PollDaddy works. For those feeling cynical about under-representation of women and ethnic minorities in the tech sphere, here is Valleywag’s take on the acquisition.

FriendFeed realtime updates makes life harder for procrastinators
As if we social media slaves don’t already have a million and one ways to distract ourselves (answering web-based polls is an SMI favourite), FriendFeed launched an experimental real-time view just in time for the big debate where a long polling feature means comments and posts appear at the top
of your feed as quickly as they arrive – doing away with the need to refresh.

Michael Arrington rightly points out that it makes FriendFeed, which this media watcher had begun to wonder was superfluous, the ultimate live-blogging tool. After all, FriendFeed has never yet had a need for a Fail Whale style 404-page.

Ever the FriendFeed fan, Scoble loves this, saying: "This is wild. It’s like the web has been turned into a chat room."

Meanwhile…

…Louis Gray reckons it ain’t yet a Twitter-killer: "While the new feature is intriguing … the team hasn’t yet connected its capability to
search or keyword filtering, which, if ever delivered, could be a body
blow to Twitter search. In the interim, thanks to this gap, Twitter remains where I would go to take a large community’s temperature in real time."

@everybody ?s @stephenfry
Staying with Twitter, this week the Twitterverse has been abuzz with the entry into the fray of one @stephenfry, who, it is known, possesses impeccable geek credentials. Fry has been using his iPhone to keep his 6000+ followers updated of his travels to Africa to film the documentary series ‘Last Chance To See..’ and generally adding sunshine and rainbows to their day in the process.

Of course, Twitter is not without its celebrity users, including (in no particular order) Tim O’Reilly, Dr Horrible, Wil Wheaton, Dave Matthews, MC Hammer (!) and yes, practically the entire US government, who all use it for updates both personal and professional.

But
for some reason, no celebrity member of the Twitterati seems to have
caused as much of a splash as has Stephen Fry – possibly because his
small army of web moderators ensures he follows anyone who follows him
- and it’s impossible to feel anything but giddy delight when an email
pops up with the message "Stephen Fry is now following you on
Twitter!".

The Guardian’s Charles Arthur blogged his thoughts as to why the 51-year old Fry seems to get Twitter more than another famous British twitterer, Andy Murray, saying: "Interacting individually with thousands of people isn’t feasible. But
Fry gives us an interesting insight into how to fake it: he skims
through the comments on his pictures or tweets, and provides
portmanteau answers (‘You’re all sick! Sick you hear? Eating a [rhino]
ear notch! They’re notched for identification, btw.’). It’s
interaction; the sort Murray, who like most tennis players dislikes
answering repetitive questions from the press, might actually enjoy."

And in double quick time, Fry demonstrated just how at home he is with this whole social media lark.