WordPress have announced the addition of a great new feature for hosted WordPress.com bloggers which allows them to easily mark the posts they like and from other blogs and share it with their own visitors.
The Like option will now appear on your dashboard if you are signed in.
If you choose to Like an article it will be marked for future reference. You can also choose to reblog the post or see all the articles you have ‘Liked’.
If you click on the ‘Reblog this post’ link you will be taken to a new tab called ‘QuickPress’. This automatically creates an excerpt of the article and a thumbnail (if the article has an image). There is also a an area for you to add your comments to the article.
I think that this is a fantastic addition to WordPress. It’s basically a Retweet for bloggers but it works really well, particularly with the ability to add your own comments.
The posts you like are also listed under a new tab called (surprisingly) ‘Posts I Like’. You can reblog the posts from this area too.
It would be great to see the ‘Like’ and ‘Reblog’ features integrated into self hosted blogs in some way in the future. However I think it would have to be included with official releases for it to become popular (i.e. instead of a plugin).
In other news, WordPress have announced that Gravatar public profiles are now live. This option has been available since March however profiles were private until yesterday.
Hopefully we will also see some sort of integration of this feature with the self hosted version of WordPress in the future as it’s a great way to centralise a lot of information about yourself such as MSN, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc.
What do you think of the new ‘Like’ feature on WordPress.com?
Kevin
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