Twitter client developers will be pleased to note that popular light blogging platform Tumblr now supports a Tweetie and Twitterific compatible API. In a recent blog post, the company explains how the API will help Twitter clients support Tumblr. While the release allows for similar posting and reading capabilities to last week’s WordPress API announcement, it’s a coup for those looking to Twitter to become the open messaging standard.
In response to today’s Tumblr announcement, RSS pioneer and blogger Dave Winer writes, “Conventional wisdom says that open standards are created by endless deliberations among experts and big tech companies, and those sometimes gain traction, but this is how it usually happens. Someone goes first. No one thinks of it as an open standard. Then someone clones it. All of a sudden people get ideas. Inspired, someone goes third. At this point it’s inevitable that there will be a fourth and fifth and so on.”
Last week ReadWriteWeb suggested that a publish/subscribe standard was already beginning to take shape with both the WordPress API and Twitter/Feedburner integration. As of today, we may be one step closer to a web where content feeds are standardized and portable across a variety of platforms and services.
