There have been a couple of new developments in the past week regarding the Twitter API and, surprisingly, they don't really have anything to do with Twitter at all. Rather they have to do with 'old school' blogging platforms WordPress and Tumblr adopting the Twitter API as their own. What this means is that people using third-party Twitter apps can now use them for WordPress as well, for example, to some degree as the implementations aren't complete yet.

“We’ve enabled posting to and reading of WordPress.com blogs via the Twitter API. Any app that allows you to set a custom API URL will work,” WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote about a week ago. “I see the Twitter API as one of the new de facto standards that as many applications should support as possible.”

It didn't take long for Mullenweg's words to take heed and up and coming blogging platform Tumblr also rolled out a similar feature. “Inspired by Wordpress’ seriously clever use of Loren Brichter’s new Tweetie options, we’re launching our own Tweetie and Twitterrific compatible API. This Twitter-like API should make it easy for a lot of existing Twitter clients to start supporting Tumblr,” Tumblr wrote.

The support isn't complete, for WordPress you can read and even write posts and you can geotag it as well, but more advanced functionality is not available yet. The search API hasn't been implemented as well. There are also a couple of caveats for the apps themselves, they have to be able to set a custom URL for the API, meaning the Twitter API isn't hardcoded into the app, and some issues are bound to come up at first.

But, it's not the fact that you can post to WordPress.com from Tweetie that's that exciting part, the real issue here is the bigger picture. With WordPress and now Tumblr and others very likely to follow implementing the Twitter API, it becomes a de facto open standard with a really big chance that it gets some real traction. As RSS pioneer Dave Winer writes: “If Facebook were to implement the Twitter API that would be it. We'd have another FTP or HTTP or RSS.”