Automattic has launched a new WordPress theme and posting interface for microblogging. It sounds similar in spirit to Micro.blog:
Here’s what makes this different from a social app: every quick thought and every reblog is a real WordPress.com post on a site you own, and every reply is saved as a comment. You get the speed and feel of a social feed, with the permanence and portability of a blog. Export it, back it up, migrate it to another host. It’s yours.
I’m testing it and have a couple of initial thoughts. The first is technical. Automattic folks, please keep the <title> field blank in RSS feeds. There’s no need to duplicate the content in multiple fields. I’ve written extensively about this in my book Indie Microblogging.
In terms of the flow of the posting interface, what WordPress has done here is pretty interesting. It’s a very basic, stripped down interface, clearly inspired by Twitter / X.
The downside to that approach is that it is disconnected from the traditional WordPress admin interface. If you go back to the WordPress admin, you’ll see the same posts but it feels a little out of place. For example, you’ll notice that short, title-less posts suddenly have a title.
With Micro.blog, we’ve tried really hard to have a cohesive posting and editing interface that starts simple and scales to long-form writing, photo blogs, and podcasts without completely changing. I think that’s one of the under-appreciated strengths of Micro.blog.
I also wonder if Automattic has given any thought to how this fits with their other microblogging platform, Tumblr. Matt Mullenweg’s original goal after the acquisition was to rebuild Tumblr with a WordPress backend. With this completely new short-form interface, there could be even more fragmentation.
This new theme and interface is a 1.0. I don’t know where it’s going, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it. And because it’s just WordPress, Micro.blog can already integrate with it pretty well.
