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."
Frankly, I'd much rather see OpenMicroBlogging being used and promoted rather than the Twitter API. It's used in StatusNet and identi.ca and allows for seamless subscriptions between various OpenMicroBlogging-enabled sites. It's sort of like the XMPP/Jabber of microblogging.
StatusNet also supports the Twitter API, but I don't know of any clients that let me point to identi.ca instead of Twitter. I use Gwibber, though which natively supports both of them and more.