Matt Mullenweg, a fellow Houstonian and all around cool guy spoke to us today at Web 2.0 Expo about Wordpress’s present and future. Some features from the talk:

Wordpress has 2 main products, Akismet, and Wordpress.com. Akismet is solving many of the Spam problems Matt Cutts from Google talked about earlier, and Wordpress.com handles much of the “Software as a Service” suggestion Matt Cutts gave.

Wordpress.com has had a tremendous Growth. At their start, they had just 2 million uniques. This year, Wordpress.com is at 168 million unique visitors, all with only 20 employees.

Some featured Wordpress.com blogs that Matt Mullenweg likes:

• NY Times
• Flickr Blog
• Fail blog
• I can haz cheeseburger

99.999% of Wordpress.com blogs get less than 10k pages/day. They are all on a different model.

Matt had some great announcements. He mentioned that 40-45% of their traffic is going to permalink pages. Therefore they are introducing a new feature they call “(Possibly) Related Posts”. With this, Wordpress.com lists relevent links below each blog post, the first being links from your blog. Secondly, posts from the 300 million blogs hosted on Wordpress.com are displayed, then mainstream news sites are displayed - these are all opt-out. Matt mentioned they partnered and worked with the company Sphere to do this.

The coolest announcement of Matt’s was the announcement of a new theme called Monotone. Monotone automatically adapts its color scheme to the photos uploaded to to Wordpress. The idea is to adapt changes to the look and feel of your website based on what you’re doing, and every page changes as you move through the site - it was actually quite beautiful, and knowing that Matt is a very good Photographer I expect to see some cool things from that theme. I’m told Monotone will be released some time soon.