Kristina P, writing on the official Jetpack blog, in a post titled “The End of Twitter Auto-Sharing”:

Twitter decided, on short notice, to dramatically change the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, the Twitter connection on Jetpack Social will cease to work, and your blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter.

This was bound to happen, and we’ll be seeing many more such announcements in the coming days.

Yael Rubinstein, writing on the Pocket Casts blog:

We’ve been eager to take this step since we joined Automattic last year — after all, the company’s creed includes the phrase “I know that open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.” We believe that podcasting can not and should not be controlled by Apple and Spotify, and instead support a diverse ecosystem of third-party clients.

It was just a matter of time when this would happen, as anyone who knows Automattic knows their love for open source. The only surprising thing to me is that Pocket Casts is only making their mobile apps open source, the Desktop and Web versions are not included in this anouncement and the company says it has no plans to do so either.

This announcement has generally been received positively by users and developers of other podcasts apps.

The iOS repository as well as the Android repository are up on GitHub with a Mozilla Public License 2.0.

Matt Mullenweg, writing on his personal blog about Automattic’s latest Series D round from Salesforce Ventures at a $3 billion valuation.

For Automattic, the funding will allow us to accelerate our roadmap (perhaps by double) and scale up our existing products—including WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and (in a few days when it closes) Tumblr. It will also allow us to increase investing our time and energy into the future of the open source WordPress and Gutenberg.

Automattic has long been one of my most revered companies on the internet. The way WordPress has evolved over the years, complimented by products like Jetpack and VaultPress, it truly remarkable.

And so, I’ve been very excited to see what the Automattic team does with its Tumblr acquisition. Tumblr was known to have phenomenal potential back in the day, and with the right team running it now, I long to see where the product goes. At the bare minimum, I hope Tumblr can act as an alternative or replacement to Instagram, which Facebook has already ruined with too many ads.

WordPress Celebrates its 15th Anniversary Today

15 Years of WordPress

On May 27, 2003 — exactly fifteen years ago today, the first version of WordPress was made available for download. Unlike most software releases that start at v1.0, this was Version 0.7 of WordPress that was being released as the first non-beta.

What began as a fork of b2/cafelog over 15 years ago has today turned into a robust, reliable and popular Content Management System that powers close to 30% of the world’s top 10 million websites.

WordPress holds a very special place in my life and I’ve been building websites powered by WordPress since 2006. Although I’m not a fan of the clunky mess that WordPress is turning into, I still love building with WordPress and couldn’t be more excited about the years to come.