With today’s announcement that it has bought the all-in-one messaging service Texts.com for $50 million, Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com and Tumblr, is expanding its portfolio to include yet another business. According to an announcement on the business side, the app consolidates all your messaging applications into a single dashboard. This includes iMessage, Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger, LinkedIn, Signal, Discord, and X, with plans to include other apps shortly.
Texts.com provides end-to-end encryption of your conversations and additional features that users have long needed, such as the capability to plan messages at a time that is convenient for the receiver rather than simply for you. This contrasts with other firms, such as Beeper, who have attempted to achieve something comparable. You may also mark messages as unread even on services that don’t offer that function. This allows you to remember to check that message again when you return and obtain summaries of lengthy group discussions you’ve missed.
In a release, the business discussed its interest in the messaging platform, stating that the acquisition enables it to enter a “fourth market integral to the modern web experience: messaging.”
WordPress is used for online publishing, WooCommerce for e-commerce, and Tumblr for blogging and offering ad capabilities. Automattic offers all of these services. In 2021, it purchased the journaling software Day One and the podcasting service Pocket Casts. More recently, it purchased an ActivityPub plugin that enables WordPress blogs to link to the larger web of interconnected but decentralized social networking applications such as Mastodon. This network is generally referred to as the fediverse.
Following the completion of the purchase, Kishan Bagaria, the creator of Texts.com, will join the firm as the new head of messaging. The rest of the global Texts.com team will join him.
The Verge was the first to disclose information about the acquisition. In an interview with the Pivot podcast, the owner of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, revealed that some of the motivation for the deal was developed out of personal dissatisfaction. He noted that everyone has many messaging applications, and monitoring who you messaged on each one is difficult.
“I found myself sort of getting very behind and so went out in the market, and actually Automattic ended up making some investments in this space over the last few years, including in Element, which is a Matrix company, Beeper, which is another app, which has some similar things, but differently, and came across Texts, and was just taken with the product,” he explained. “I found myself sort of getting very behind and so went out in the market, and Automattic ended up making some investments in this space.”
In addition to that, he mentioned that he enjoys working in fields where one may devote one’s entire life to the subject matter.
In addition, Mullenweg mentioned the existing regulatory structure as a factor that helped make the transaction more feasible. Because it is user-centric, operates client-side, and is 100% encrypted, he anticipated it would be more difficult for Apple, Google, and Meta to prohibit a smaller player like Texts due to the EU legislation. Moreover, he believed this would be true because Texts are 100% encrypted.
“So it’s just as secure as their desktop apps,” he added. “So it’s just as secure.” (Apple has been fighting to prevent its iOS platform from being opened to third-party app shops because these stores offer a lower level of security than its own. It couldn’t make the same case with Texts.com).
Mullenweg believes that a major firm that is not seen as “Big Tech” will be able to facilitate the development of texts more expediently while preserving the company’s concentration on its primary mission. He believed that large corporations like Google frequently get their messaging wrong. (Once, Google worked on so many distinct communications projects that it became a running joke.) In addition, Apple has integrated iMessage so deeply into its ecosystem that users who do not own an iPhone or a Mac computer cannot participate in its services. According to an article from The Wall Street Journal from the previous year, teenagers in the United States, particularly, are hooked on the Apple world because of the blue bubbles.
The creator of Automattic also stated that Texts.com is a good fit for the firm because of its user-centric ideals and the fact that it makes an effort to support all of the different messaging platforms people use.
“As consumers, we make use of every one of these things. And the businesses would like you to believe that you don’t, but the reality is that we all do. That’s another area we’ve put a lot of effort into, and it’s simply something we’ve been trying to integrate with everything. He explained that people can build plugins for anything thanks to open source, which further simplifies the process. “So, if you keep those three things in mind, you can compete with the big guys, and in fact, you can thrive.” Texts.com is unavailable to the general public; however, a waitlist can be accessed.
