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WordPress.com Implements the Twitter API 39

Posted by kdawson from the what-comes-after-embrace-and-extend dept.
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."
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WordPress.com Implements the Twitter API More

WordPress.com Implements the Twitter API

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  • I felt a great disturbance ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Statecraftsman ( 718862 ) * on Saturday December 12, 2009 @08:39PM (#30418628)
    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.

  • Just another API (Score:3, Informative)

    by sopssa ( 1498795 ) * <sopssa@email.com> on Saturday December 12, 2009 @08:40PM (#30418636) Journal

    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... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zouden ( 232738 ) on Saturday December 12, 2009 @08:53PM (#30418694)

    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: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 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.
       

      • Bring on the AC Winer-hate!

        The Twitter API is nothing more than a REST implementation. Seriously, how can you compare the Twitter API with XML-RPC or SOAP? If you want to rant about the last two, you should have at least compared them with REST. The Twitter API might be far better designed because it offers a limited amount of functionality, versus REST, XML-RPC and SOAP that provide a protocol to implement web-based APIs.

        Besides, how should I know what POSTing to /statuses/update means: the "Twitter API RP

    • Re:Misleading summary... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nhaines ( 622289 ) <nhaines@@@ubuntu...com> on Saturday December 12, 2009 @09:52PM (#30418962) Homepage

      Frankly, I'd much rather see OpenMicroBlogging [wikipedia.org] 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 [launchpad.net], though which natively supports both of them and more.

    • "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

      The word 'insidious' has rather negative connotations [dict.org], but I don't understand (from Winer's post) how WordPress may have done this with malintent. Does he have something against open standards? Does he think that WordPress has it in for Identica or others?

  • Probably....

    So who will be the first to use it?

  • Finally a use for Twitter I can support... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Phrogman ( 80473 ) on Saturday December 12, 2009 @10:00PM (#30418986)

    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

    • 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

      Egads! Ye Luddite!! And what a way to lose wife and friends!!!

    • I know the perfect social un-networking site for you: isolatr.com [isolatr.com]. It's worked great for me over the years. No signup, no annoying emails, nobody bothering me, no updates to make, ever.

  • Why not identi.ca? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TeXMaster ( 593524 ) on Saturday December 12, 2009 @10:22PM (#30419086)
    I'm surprised these open source project haven't implemented the open source microblogging standard put forth by status.net (former laconi.ca) [status.net]. Its ability to handle cross-site microblogging is rather interesting and more appropriate for these platforms, IMO.

  • Its disturbing that they are now going to let even more people in...

  • Watch This Space (Score:2, Insightful)

    by donnacha ( 161610 )
    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? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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. [twitter.com] 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

    • 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

      The "already read this ID" feature of what? That's not a feature of Atom or RSS feeds. They just supply a feed of items; it's up to the client to filter them if it wants to remove already-read entries.

      Or are you saying that Twitter doesn't provide persistent IDs for entries?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Animats ( 122034 )

        RSS supports an "etag", which is supposed to indicate if the feed has something new. When the client polls an RSS server, and gets XML data, the data includes an etag value. When you poll an RSS feed, you supply the etag value from last time. If the feed hasn't changed, the client is supposed to get a 304 status.

        Some RSS feed servers implement this, and some don't. Twitter doesn't. So polling Twitter via RSS results in far more network traffic than it should, and extra client work throwing out dupli

  • A quick search of the wordpress plugins directory shows over 500 twitter related plugins [wordpress.org] so this is news because?

    • A quick search of the wordpress plugins directory shows over 500 twitter related plugins so this is news because?

      Because they needed a press release with embedded hype-terms?

  • 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

  • blowback (Score:2)

    by hey ( 83763 )

    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.

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