twitblogs.com  Fall 2008

AllowsTwitter users  to write more than 140 characters, or to embed images into their posts, etc. You can user your Twitter login to get in.

This is a great company that is worth mentioning…

FeedBurner is a feed management service launched in February 2004 by co-founders Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski and Matt Strobe. 

FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Their Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.
It offers advertising services for blogs and podcasts also.

WordPress.com
WordPress.com provides free weblog hosting (from company Automattic). It opened to November 21, 2005.

It runs WordPress MU, a version of the original software that allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge involved in setting up WordPress on an ordinary hosting account. It is financially supported via the use of Google Adsense banners and paid upgrades.

wordpress.org
WordPress is a self-hosted blog publishing system written in PHP. All data is stored in a MySQL database. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

The latest release of WordPress is version 2.6, released on 15 July 2008. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

 
Matt is the cofounding developer behind the open source WordPress blogging platform and its founding company AutomatticA Houston native, Matt also serves as an adviser to Sphere and WeGame.

San Francisco, CA, started 07-05 – automattic.com

The below information is taken from crunchbase.com

Automattic is a web development and blogware company which can attribute much of its success to its popular blog platform WordPress.com, an adaptation of the open source WordPress project. The company was founded by 20-something Matt Mullenweg who continues to be the primary developer and spokesman for the company. Former OddPost CEO and Yahoo Senior Executive Toni Schneider is CEO.

In addition to having 4 self-produced products (WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Akismet.com and bbPress) Automattic will now integrate Gravatar identity badges and all of Gravatar’s premium features into WordPress templates. Gravatar is Automattic’s first acquisition.

There are more than a million blogs hosted by Automattic, with thousands of new ones created each day.

www.identi.ca – created July 2, 2008 by Evan Prodromou

A microblogging site (similar to Twitter)

Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service. You can use it to write short notices about yourself, where you are, and what you’re doing, and those notices will be sent to all your friends and fans.

How is Identi.ca different from Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, others?
Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Our main goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users’ autonomy. In particular, all the software used for Identi.ca is Free Software, and all the data is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.

The software also implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that you can have friends on other microblogging services that can receive your notices.

The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).