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WordPress.com Implements the Twitter API
This morning Matt Mullenweg announced on his blog that WordPress.com has enabled posting and reading blogs via the Twitter API. Now any Twitter app that supports a custom API URL (Tweetie is one such) can be used to either post updates to a WordPress.com blog, or to read updates from blogs to which one has subscribed. Dave Winer calls the move by Automattic, WordPress.com's parent company, "deeply insidious," and notes that 10 years ago he did a similar thing in his Manila blogging platform when the Blogger API came out. Winer opines that Automattic's move has made the Twitter API into an open standard, due to WordPress.com's large base. Winer notes (in a comment on the above-linked post), "The fun starts if they [WordPress] relax some of the limits of the Twitter API and fix some of the glaring problems."
I felt a great disturbance in the Blogosphere, as if millions of rants were posted but were abruptly truncated at 140 characters. I fear something terrible has happened.
They're just adding a feature for who use Twitter apps. It's not like this will become the only supported way to post or read blog replies, so what does it matter? They do support other blog posting API's too.
Drupal has had a Twitter addon for ages now.
I thought it strange that this move would be called "deeply insidious". Here's the context in Dave Winer's blog post:
Since there is effectively now dozens of twitter clients capable of connecting to wordpress via this api, the api becomes a de-facto standard for accessing blogs.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Winer? or Whiner?
Probably....
So who will be the first to use it?
Did you *really* believe anyone thought wordpress was limiting their blogging s/w to 140 characters?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It will let me post to my blog. I have a Twitter account only because I was interested to see how it worked. I have made exactly 2 Tweets. Once I realized i would need friends who cared what I was doing, I realized it wasn't for me. I am happily living a rather dull existence :)
I have just realized a hitch with using this for updating my blog: I don't have a blog, and with few friends who would want to read it, not much reason to start one.
I know its old fashioned but if I think of interesting things to say, I say them to my wife or my friends face to face :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I'm surprised these open source project haven't implemented the open source microblogging standard put forth by status.net (former laconi.ca). Its ability to handle cross-site microblogging is rather interesting and more appropriate for these platforms, IMO.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Its disturbing that they are now going to let even more people in...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Automattic are doing some of the most interesting stuff in Open Source these days and have some serious nerve backing up their vision, reportedly turning down a $100m cash + $100 stock deal a couple of years ago, I think possibly from Facebook. Smart move, they are worth a lot more today and no owner would let them do game-changing stuff like this.
Definitely a company to watch.
Blog CMS gets a new module. Who cares?
They need to come up with something that lets you read each item exactly once - no duplicates, and no missing items.
Here's a Twitter feed in XML. That's updated every 60 seconds, and if you miss something, it's gone.
Twitter has an RSS feed capability, but it doesn't properly support the "already read this ID" feature; every poll gets you a dump of the relevant inbox. (Some server side implementations of RSS get this right. Some have problems because they're front-ended by caching servers which lack cache coherency, and you get a different message ID depending on which server you happen to reach.
One of the fundamental problems in computer science is arranging things so that B keeps up with changes at A. There are known good solutions, (see "two-phase commit") and we're not seeing them enough. Even email doesn't do it right.
A quick search of the wordpress plugins directory shows over 500 twitter related plugins so this is news because?
I'm in China. What's Wordpress and what's Twitter?
Yeah, it's nice that WordPress gets support for Twitter protocol.
So, would the Twitter clients please stop thinking that Twitter is the only site that speaks Twitter protocol?
I've been using identi.ca, and you can post on identi.ca using Twitter API. All you need to do is to change the base URL. And Twitter clients as a rule don't let you do that. People hard-code their clients to point to twitter.com. I've seen a lot of pointless forks of Twitter clients that differ from the base version only in that they specify another website to post to.
I'm not kidding. Hard coding. In 2009. In this "Web 2.0" environment which was supposed to be all about openness and interoperability.
I certainly hope that this will make the Twitter client makers to wake up and fix this glaring flaw in their software packages. Twitter API is no longer Twitter's own.
The twitter company problem made and released their API so their product would become more embedded in things. That happened. But I bet they never thought that the API spec would be re-implemented by another company. Its an interesting development. Their market power was able to create a de-facto standard but then the standard was non entirely theirs.
Of course, the market leading API has been reimplemented many times before. AMD makes x86 chips. Wine and ReactOS make Windows.
...it matters because people who like Twitter and the ecosystem around it can now easily migrate to a less proprietary platform.