A couple of social features missing from the blogging platform

Jun 2, 2010 09:17 GMT  ·  By

Blogging is ‘old school’ these days, but there are efforts to keep people interested and borrowing from competitors or newer platforms isn’t necessarily a bad thing. WordPress.com, the second largest blog-hosting platform on the web, is launching a couple of interesting, new though not exactly original features, reblogging and the ability to ‘like’ a post.

“Have you ever come across a blog post that you enjoyed so much you wanted to easily share it with the readers of your own blog? Sure, you can copy and paste the link and perhaps even a snippet of text with your own comments, but overall it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience,” the WordPress.com blog read. “Today we’re introducing a new like and reblog feature enabled across the whole of WordPress.com.”

Logged-in users will now see a new button in their top dashboard bar, the ‘Like’ button. With Facebook having launched a very similar feature that is now taking over the web, the functionality of the feature is easy to understand. Blog owners will be able to know how many people ‘liked’ an item and users will be able to keep track of their favorite posts with the new ‘Posts I Like’ feature.

Once you like a post, the button will have a couple of new options. One of them will be to reblog the post. Clicking on that will take you to the new QuickPress tab, which enables you to quickly repost the item. QuickPress will fill out the title and add a snippet of text from the original post, as well as a link back to it. You can add your own comments or just publish it as it is, the whole thing takes just a few clicks.

This is a great improvement, as users have complained about the number of steps needed to post something on WordPress. This has allowed others like Tumblr or Posterous to attract users looking for a simpler way to blog. With the new features, WordPress.com may persuade some users not to switch even if it’s not going to bring anyone back.