The new version also now automatically saves posts and restores them if the network connection is lost during the publishing process.

Just like the first version, Wordpress for iPhone 2 is an open-source program.

It's important to note that this new version will not appear as an update to the old version. Instead, users will have to install a new app, which can run side-by-side with the older version.

The new version, of course, still offers the same basic feature set as the earlier version. These include support for multiple blogs, photo uploads and post previews, as well as full support for tags, categories and password protected posts.

Blogging on the iPhone

There can be little doubt that the iPhone - or any mobile phone for that matter - isn't the ideal platform for writing long, thoughtful blog posts. Maybe that's why Wordpress for iPhone 2 puts more emphasis on comment moderation than the first version.

For a quick blog post on the road, though, the app is perfectly adequate, especially if you just want to upload a few pictures. It's not as easy to use as the more specialized PicPosterous, but Wordpress for iPhone 2 is a far more flexible application and Wordpress has a different user in mind for this app.

Scarcely seven weeks after its acquisition was announced, After the Deadline's core technology is being released under the GPL. Moreover, writes Mullenweg, "There's also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any text area."

The related API is the same one that powers a plugin from another Automattic property, Intense Debate. Mudge told Ostatic, "I'd like to see AtD spread as far and wide as possible. I'm an inventor first and have this desire to see my inventions help people."

Interested parties can check out this demo or read the tech overview and grab the source code here.

As we wrote earlier today though, consumers are not happy with how the mobile web is performing. Turning on mobile themes by default could be one small step towards solving that problem in the large territory that is WordPress.

Earlier this month WordPress announced that users can now more easily publish links to their new blog posts out into the world's defacto light-weight RSS reader, Twitter.

From the slow emergence of mobile reading and publishing to the unwillingness of carrierers to solve bandwidth problems, it's clear that the mobile web is still in its very early stages. For now, little things like this make a very big difference.

Users who run their own WordPress installations were already able to ping Twitter whenever they posted an update thanks to plugins like Twitter Tools or Twitter Updater.

For WordPress.com, this is an important update, as it brings it up to par with light blogging services like Posterous, which have made autoposting to Twitter and other microblogging services a core feature of their products.

More WordPress Updates: New Theme Viewer and PicApps Partnership

The Wordpress team has been quite busy lately, besides launching Publicize, Wordpress also unveiled a new version of its theme viewer last week and two days ago, Wordpress also announced a partnership with PicApp that allows Wordpress users to embed premium images into their blogs.

If you can't make it to Mountain View, California in eight days, get ready to watch selected sessions streamed live online (thanks to Justin.tv). This isn't going to be talking-heads pushing their products on stage, this is going to be a high-value brainstorming, networking and collaborative learning. Check out the companies below; they are bringing financial support to this important gathering to talk together about the future of the internet.

Now check out these fabulous sponsors.

Enterprise

TIBCO

TIBCO's technology digitized Wall Street in the '80s with its event-driven "Information Bus" software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the '90s. Today, TIBCO's infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions.

Filtering

PostRank

PostRank offers a website and developer tools that make sense of social engagement data on the web. Want to discover the bloggers with the most reader-engagement or the blog posts that are hottest, in any niche? PostRank will do that for you, in real time. Whether you're a very large company or an individual blogger, PostRank can do things for you that no one else can. We at ReadWriteWeb like and use PostRank a lot.

Search

Faroo

Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis.

Publishing

WordPress

WordPress is one of the world's leading blog publishing services and software. WordPress made free real-time updates from millions of blogs available last month.

Aggregation

Nomee

Nomee is an application to manage the most important parts of your digital life. The Nomee desktop client aggregates activity updates from more than 120 different sites that your friends and favorite public figures are using, filters those streams and lets you view media in a beautiful interface.

These sponsors have made an important move in supporting the Real-Time Web Summit so please check out their products. If you're interested in sponsoring the event as well, it will be worth your while. Contact sales@readwriteweb.com for info.

Please join us for this important conversation on October 15th in Mountain View, California and streaming live online.

While it's true MySpace's commitment to member customization allowed the community's lowest common denominators to bring down the look of the site, Facebook's aesthetic has also suffered with 3rd party app integration. This is hardly a reason for such a mass migration. And because MySpace and Facebook both offer Blackberry and iPhone applications, it's also unlikely that mobile access played a huge part in MySpace's demise as market leader.

Dougherty's assessment about Facebook Connect is likely the key reason for such dramatic traffic growth given her enclosed time line. As high traffic services like Disqus, Digg and WordPress began using Facebook Connect, members found cross-platform distribution with ease-of-use. Facebook moved from being a College forum site to a full scale lifestyle platform. Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system.

In early June Inside Facebook reported that Americans spent 13.9 billion minutes per year on Facebook and 5 billion minutes on MySpace. When you remember that Facebook doesn't allow for time-consuming html-based profile customizations, you realize the feat they've accomplished. Rather than depending solely on its employees, Facebook's success relies on the fact that it increases its value through its 15,000 Facebook Connect members and more than 50,000 app developers.

RSSCloud is an element that's always been present in the RSS 2.0 spec but has drawn new attention with the rise of interest in the Real-Time Web. The element was just added to the WordPress code this afternoon. The implications of this big vote of support go beyond reading WordPress blogs; this is the kind of traction that new technologies can leverage to gain support in many different applications.

Google Reader, the dominant RSS aggregator on the market, began a limited implementation of a related protocol called PubSubHubbub last month. Facebook-acquired FriendFeed worked with Google on that system.

Now RSSCloud has a posse. Half a million blogs are created each month on WordPress and if Google Reader keeps taking its sweet time checking those blogs for updates instead of turning on support for RSSCloud, it's going to look slow as molasses.

Real time updates could enable several things. Faster distribution of blog posts, more compelling conversations in real-time and a renewed timeliness for blogging vs. services like Twitter are all likely consequences. The list of possible technical developments on top of RSSCloud could be as open-ended as the developments enabled by the core of RSS.

RSS has made blogging viable by freeing readers of the requirement of visiting each site they are interested in. It has made podcasts subscribable. It has made wiki change notifications trackable outside the mess of the email inbox. It has made search a persistent action, instead of a one-off occasional delayed reaction. RSS is mixable, mashable, parsable, filterabile.

Now RSSCloud could add a real-time dimension to all of that. The paradigm just got a very big vote of support.

RWW first covered Sampa in June 2006 and the service certainly evolved since then. It went from being an overly techie-looking blogging platform to a user-friendly family tool with built-in family tree, baby countdown timer and import functionality from Flickr and YouTube.

Despite having shaped itself into a great tool, in the current market, Sampa's closure seemed a high possibility. Sampa was often compared to the more well-known Yahoo GeoCities service. When ReadWriteWeb profiled the closure of GeoCities in April we predicted that a number of web site building tools would also meet their unfortunate end. As non-commercial users increasingly produce content for 3rd party networks and blogs, the family web-building space becomes even smaller.

Sampa recommends users export their baby-related site materials to TotSites, their family journals to Cozi and their general purpose blogs to WordPress. Another smart option might be Picalily. Meanwhile those looking for a simple family tree application might want to try Geni or Genoom.

For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.

Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."

This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.

At press time we have not had a chance to try out Six Apart's new free, open source plugins but Wordpress users can read more about them and try them out here.

Features

One nice feature of WordPress' Post By Email feature is that the service automatically creates a gallery for posts with multiple pictures. Users can also easily post YouTube videos by email, as the service automatically creates an embed when it sees a YouTube URL in an email. WordPress also supports a number of additional short codes that give users more control over the formatting of their posts.

WordPress vs. Posterous

Of course, Posterous is probably the most well-known post-by-email service. Just like WordPress, Posterous allows users to quickly post text, images, and videos by email. Posterous, though, puts a stronger emphasis on sharing content from other sites, especially since the service introduced its bookmarklet in February. Unlike on WordPress, though, users on Posterous have no other option but to post by email or through the bookmarklet. The simplicity of Posterous is definitely one of the main draws of the service, but it looks like WordPress now offers a very similar degree of functionality, with, of course, the whole feature set of the WordPress blogging platform thrown in for good measure.

It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.

WordPress interface and experience designer, Jane Wells, wrote about opening the testing process this morning and said that she's spent years responding to people who reference a nine year old article by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen argued that usability tests only needed 5 participants in order to be effective:

"As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.

After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new."

Wells writes in response that, "While I've found that to be generally true, when your user base is as diverse in experience level, usage, platform configuration, language (right to left languages have a pretty different experience) and demography as the WordPress community is, 5 users really isn't enough to get a clear picture."

If you'd like to participate in this usability testing, professional usability test moderators are encouraged to contact Wells and eager guinea pigs are told to watch this space.

The way reply-by-email comment support will work is pretty straightforward. After enabling support for emailing comments, and then turning on the 'Enable sending comment replies via email' option (both found on the Settings > Discussion page), you are set. The next time you get a comment, you will be notified by email, and you can respond simply by replying to the email with your text above the original comment.

The way the Backtype Connect WordPress plugin works is fairly straightforward with no additional registration needed. After installation and activation on a WordPress standalone blog, the plugin queries the BackType Connect database with the article URLs and starts importing them in to the WordPress comment database, including a footnote with a source of the comment. Icons for all of the BT Connect services are also included so that the comments indicate clearly where they are coming from.

I took an hour this morning and installed BT Connect on my personal blog, Scribkin. Installation when smoothly, but I will warn you that if you are using a comment system that is a full replacement for the one built in to WordPress (like Intense Debate or Disqus) you won't see what Backtype Connect is doing since it is acting directly on the built-in comment database. The new comments will only start showing up after a sync. If, however, you are using other WordPress comment enhancement systems like SezWho and JS-Kit, there shouldn't be any problem.