Wordpress Implements The Twitter API

I think this is pretty big news, not least of all because having such a large player adopt the Twitter API kind of pushes it towards becoming the de-facto standard for micro-blogging.

The publish/subscribe model, push-based services and real-time notifications are (IMHO) almost surely the Next Big Thing for the social web and internet in general.

Instead of the current situation of having 'subscribers' (actually not subscribers at all, as they are continuously polling) asking "is there anything new yet?"..."is there anything new yet?" (ala RSS etc) a push-based service would ping a single notification to subscribers following a publish event.

I don't know how suitable the Twitter protocol would be for this, but there are plenty of alternatives, and anyway I think its really more a case of correctly implementing and tweaking existing protocols.

One interesting example of a publish-subscribe protocol (and reference implementation, using modified RSS) is PubSubHubBub.

Interesting times indeed.

Cheers.