In a brief conversation with a commenter, Andy Peatling (Automattic’s Social Engineer and lead developer for BuddyPress) revealed WordPress’s plans to port the reblog feature over to WP.org fans.
WordPress.com is becoming a much more holistic and compelling platform. Andy…any plans for a plugin for WP.org folks? Even if it ties into a WP.com dashboard or blog it would still be great.
The gauntlet has been thrown to Posterous and Tumblr. (Tris Hussey)
The features are written to be extractable into WP.org plugins so I’ll be working to get those released in some form. (Andy Peatling)
Implementing reblog across the WordPress universe could be apart of Automattic’s overall strategy to thwart the rise of Tumblr as well as dethrone Blogger as the top weblog platform (WordPress currently comes in at number 2).
Currently several other platforms feature the reblog function including LiveJournal, Movabletype (through a plugin) as well as Typepad by Six Apart.
Automattic has not hinted at whether they will consider porting over their like feature as well, although self hosted WordPress fans can implement “likes” upon their blogs by installing Disqus upon their blogs (which fully supports Gravatars).
