Jetpack: WordPress Wants to Bring the Best of WordPress.com to Self-Hosted Blogs

WordPress wants to bring the worlds of WordPress.com and WordPress.org closer together. Automattic’s WordPress.com, the popular blog hosting service, is also the company behind the open-source WordPress software for hosting blogs on your own server. While most of the features Automattic introduces to WordPress.com eventually make it to the self-hosted version, some rely on being hosted on the WordPress.com servers and are never released as plugins and don’t make it into the WordPress.org distribution.

Today, however, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg announced Jetpack, a new plugin for self-hosted WordPress blog that brings features like WordPress stats, Twitter widgets, support for shortcodes and \LaTeX, Automattic’s own Sharedaddy sharing buttons and wp.me shortlinks to self-hosted blogs with just one click.

Currently, all of Jetpack’s plugins are available for free, though Automattic notes that some future features “may require payment.”

jetpack_wide

WordPress has partnered with a number of popular hosting companies, including Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple and Network Solutions, to bring Jetpack to their one-click WordPress installs.

As of now, the choice of services included in Jetpack is not that exciting. Virtually all serious bloggers already use a third-party stats package and sharing buttons, for example. None of the current features really seem that exciting and worth installing Jetpack for if you already have a blog up and running. To get started, though, Jetpack looks like a great way to get access to these features quickly.