Automattic acquires writer’s block helper Plinky from Thing Labs

Plinky, a site that helps people get over writer’s block, is now a part of the WordPress.com family. Automattic (makers of WordPress.com) have announced that they have acquired Plinky from Thing Labs, which also makes popular Twitter client Brizzly. Plinky was Thing Labs’ first product which they more or less stopped developing once Brizzly started to take off.

This seems to be a win-win for everyone, as Thing Labs had basically abandoned what is an interesting product in favor of their more popular also-cutely-named Twitter client, and Automattic gets to add a service that could help its legions of bloggers on WordPress.com get over writer’s block (though with 200 million blog posts from 10.2 million blogs already on the site, we’re not sure how much writer’s blog in aggregate matters to the service).

If you haven’t tried out Plinky in the past (it launched at the beginning of 2009) Plinky works like this: the service sends you a prompt every weekday with a question such as “What is your favorite summer memory?” or similar, which is intended to get the creative juices flowing. If you have a WordPress.com blog, this might be a good time to give it a look, as when you answer a Plinky prompt, by linking Plinky to your WordPress.com account, your answer will turn up as a blog post on your blog.

Terms of the acquisition do not seem to be available.

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Correction: We mistakenly had Thing Labs as “Think” Labs when we first published.