cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ruben Bos
I’ve been cruising through a techno funk, a semi-periodic time when I am just finding the motivation gas tank leaning towards “E” and have refrained from blogging about not blogging. And I am not doing that here. After the trip to Doha, I have a half baked, half written rant on being tired of conferences (that one will be left on the vine, it is old territory).
But sometimes, something new just comes along to revive the interest- I’m not sure if this is it, but this morning I caught WordPress Matt’s announcement of Post and Read via Twitter API — and hinting at how blogging is seeing a companion burst by riding the twitter wave (not the google one):
The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging. We’ve seen ongoing growth at WordPress.com as people started using Twitter, and we expect that to continue.
So what this new API allows is a way to subscribe to content — via a twitter client– from WordPress.com blogs — it’s been a long time since I;ve been in their dashboard; they have ways to subscribe to blogs directly or via tags to content from WordPress.com blog stuff. And.. you can use the same client to create a post from a twitter client. In Matt’s post, he tells you how to set up Tweetie 2 on an iPhone to do this.
Now this hardly seemed really earth shattering world changing etc, but sometimes, I am just curious to see how it works. So I set up an account in Tweetie for my WordPress.com account, and saw it pull in the posts from my old CogDogRoo blog there (not much else as I am not subscribed to anything).
That was easy. I had to go to my WordPress.com profile, and select which blog I wanted to post to via twitter:
And then I was able to post to a WP.com blog from Tweetie 2:
which ended up, as advertised, on my CogDogLab blog http://cogdoglab.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/okay-i-am-trying-the-new-twitter-api-th/
and because I forgot I did it, went back out to my regular twitter account because I had enabled that in WordPress.com
It seemed weird at first that there was no link to this post, but why? There is nothing else more on the blog then in the tweet.
So I don’t know here what practical application this has, but it now resides as a potential capability hanging out in the internet wind. One could set up easily with a P2 like theme, a microblogging looking site on WordPress.com, perhaps providing a place to hang updates in a place that looks like twitter but is actually not. I cant see blogging by twitter being something I would be doing… but this does seem like an interesting blurring between things we see as distinctly different (blog platforms and twitter).
There is something to what Matt write suggesting about the power of APIs being able to move data between services:
APIs are Biz Dev 2.0, as Caterina Fake put it, our ability to connect Tweetie 2 to WordPress.com proves this out. We didn’t have to talk to Loren Brichter because he built custom API support into Tweetie 2 “” thanks Loren! (As an aside, I’d love to see custom API support added to TweetDeck and Seesmic, my two favorite desktop Twitter clients.)
This is a very subtle point- the developer of the Tweetie 2 app had not built this functionality into his software, but left a door for other people to be able to by adding the capability of extensible APIs. This is getting to be familiar but its also a radical way of building things from the way ti was done before the read/write web age.
No sign yet if this will be rolled into the self hosted wordpress code.
Just interesting.
