Post and Read via Twitter API
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.
Context & Ripple Effects
Since 2007 the corpus has been circling one question: does short-form posting eat blogging? Early takes like why twitter matters and What are we doing when we Twitter? treated the two formats as distinct acts, and ReadWriteWeb's mid-2008 read of the blogging landscape flagged mixed signals about whether the stream was draining attention from posts. WordPress.com itself had already experimented with the format from inside the blog, launching Prologue in January 2008 as a group-microblogging theme.
The December 2009 move settles the framing question from WordPress's side: rather than compete with the stream, WordPress.com wires its blogs directly into it via the Twitter API, and reports ongoing growth it attributes to users adopting Twitter alongside blogging. That positioning — complementarity instead of rivalry — is the notable claim, coming after a year in which Twitter's cultural weight kept rising across the corpus's coverage.
First-order effects
- WordPress.com bloggers can now push posts out to Twitter and pull their tweet stream back into the blog without leaving either platform, making the blog the durable archive and the tweet the notification layer.
Second-order effects
- Competing blogging platforms face pressure to ship equivalent Twitter plumbing or cede the 'blog as hub for your social streams' position; meanwhile Twitter gains inbound long-form content at no cost, deepening its dependence on third-party clients and integrations.
Third-order effects
- If complementarity holds as the winning strategy, publishing platforms consolidate around whoever aggregates every format — long posts, micro-posts, replies — while standalone tools for any single format risk becoming interchangeable endpoints on someone else's platform.
The trend: Blogging platforms are absorbing short-form social networks as complementary channels through API integration, converting a perceived cannibalization threat into a distribution loop.