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."

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.
 

Watch This Space

[donnacha]

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.

News?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blog CMS gets a new module. Who cares?

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.