WordPress.com

Using a Twitter client, you can connect to WordPress.com to follow your favorite blogs and receive notifications when new posts are published. You can even publish status updates to the WordPress.com blog of your choice. You’ll see the author’s gravatar in your timeline with excerpts and links to full posts. This way you can be notified of each new post within minutes.

In some ways our service is different from Twitter. A Twitter user has a timeline of status updates which is like a blog. On WordPress.com one user can write for many blogs and one blog can have many authors. And then there are comments which can be left by anonymous users.

We made our Twitter-compatible service to subscribe to blogs, whole blogs, and nothing but blogs. You can also publish updates to a blog by typing in your Twitter client. With these exciting features and themes like P2, WordPress.com is a great place for microblogging.

To connect to our Twitter API you’ll need a client that supports custom API’s. On the iPhone, there is Tweetie2. The example on the right is a desktop client called Spaz. Any client that lets you enter your own API should work.

Our API is at twitter-api.wordpress.com. Enter that URL into your client while adding a custom Twitter API account. For a secure connection use https://. To log in, enter your WordPress.com username and password (not your Twitter.com info).

Instead of following users you will follow blogs. Refer to them by their domain names (e.g. matt.wordpress.com). Support for replies and retweets will be added soon.

When you post a status update using our Twitter API, the update will appear on your blog. (If you have more than one blog you can choose which one gets the updates. The option is in your profile.)

You can give your update a post title by separating the title from the text with two colons. “So Hungry::I think I’ll have BBQ. Who wants to meet at The Salt Lick?”

This service is still in development and so it has some rough edges. Currently it uses the subscriptions you have specified in the Blog Surfer. You have to go there to add subscriptions. We’ll give you more ways to do that soon.