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."

Comments

I felt a great disturbance ...

[Statecraftsman]

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.

Re:I felt a great disturbance ...

[mdenham]

I felt a great disturbance in the Blogosphere, as if millions of rants were posted but were abruptly truncated at 140 characters. I fear som

Fixed.

Re:I felt a great disturbance ...

[noidentity]

I feel the same. It's terrible to be supporting a new protocol that's worse! But the most important reason I am against this is that it wil

<posted via Twitteriffic>

Just another API

[sopssa]

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.

Misleading summary...

[Zouden]

I thought it strange that this move would be called "deeply insidious". Here's the context in Dave Winer's blog post:

It’s a beautiful move. As I said to Matt in an email: it’s both deeply respectful and deeply insidious. It’s exactly what I would do if I were in his shoes. In fact, I did do it, in 1999, when the Blogger API came out. I immediately implemented it in our Manila blogging software.

The implications? Well, the Twitter API may have just become an open standard. I know that Identica has already implemented it, but wordpress.com has a much larger installed base. Where the client vendors may have overlooked the connection to Identica, they will be tempted by the connection to WordPress. Should they implement special features for WordPress? Hmmm.

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.

Re:Misleading summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is, the Twitter API is actually far better-designed and more well-specified than the previous piles of hacks that Winer foisted on us.

XML-RPC? Completely schemaless, you have no way of knowing what anything actually means in it. No namespace support either. RSS? It still doesn't do namespaces (the dc: elements are HARDWIRED). SOAP? Started the same way, ended up with a horribly overwrought schema (XSD) and even that only after well after Winer left it behind.
 

Re:Misleading summary...

[nhaines]

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.

Is this another WP security hole?

[Ice Station Zebra]

Probably....

So who will be the first to use it?

Finally a use for Twitter I can support...

[Phrogman]

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

Re:Whoosh

[maxume]

I hoped and dreamed!

Why not identi.ca?

[TeXMaster]

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.

Open standard tied to a single website

[WWWWolf]

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.

Re:Something where you can read each item once.

[metamatic]

Etag is nothing to do with RSS. It's an HTTP feature.

And since Twitter supports if-modified-since, you can use that instead.