As mentioned in our post on the Simplenote blog, Simperium has been acquired by Automattic! We’re really excited about this and what it will mean for the platform.

Automattic and WordPress are huge proponents of open source software so we’re happy to be able to go forward with our plans to open up the code, starting with the iOS and JavaScript client libraries. In the short term we’ll also be moving to faster hardware, so overall performance and stability of the hosted service should improve.

We’re going to keep expanding Simperium as a tool for building apps. Adding Simperium to apps that can work from a local datastore lets you automatically synchronize data across different instances and platforms. This way of building apps feels natural, a model where the developer can focus purely on the data itself, not networking or APIs. Synchronizing data is just part of the problem though. We’ll be adding better support for things like binary syncing and collaboration, along with a wider variety of client libraries.

Automattic is a distributed company with employees all over the world. They understand the value and importance of collaborative tools. While Simperium currently provides a great way to synchronize data, we also want to make it easier to do things like creating and managing groups of people that need access to the same data, sharing presence information, and showing authors of changes. These are problems that come up again and again when building a collaborative app.

There are still plenty of challenges along the way. If these problems sound interesting, you might consider working with us from wherever you may be in the world.