Connect Your WordPress Blog With Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com has given its Jetpack plugin a big update.
Think of Jetpack as a bridge that brings functionality from the hosted WordPress.com service to self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. It adds in lots of the core WordPress.com features, such as stats, social comments, email subscriptions and more.
With Jetpack 2.0, the plugin gets lots of new functionality, including the ability to automate sharing posts to various social networks.

With Publicize, users can configure their self-hosted WordPress blogs to share posts with social networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo and Tumblr.
In my tests, the Publicize feature worked incredibly well. It allowed me to instantly syndicate a blog post to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Tumblr.
Check out the Results:

Testing JetPack 2.0 wp.me/pfFBQ-5Iu
— Christina Warren (@film_girl) November 8, 2012

Facebook Shares

Tumblr

While this functionality has been available via other plugins for years — Jetpack has an edge over some other plugins in that setup is very, very simple. That simplicity comes at the cost of customizability, so if you’re the type of person who likes to syndicate content in a specific way or with a specific syntax or style, you might want to stick with more advanced solutions.

Other New Features

Other new features include:

• Photon — This is a service that handles image resizing and caching on WordPress.com’s servers. This is especially handy for users who have updated their websites for retina displays because it handles choosing what size image to serve to different devices.
• Post By Email — WordPress has had the ability to post by email for years, however, the process of actually accomplishing this task was complicated and unreliable. Jetpack now brings Post by Email to WordPress.org sites the same way it exists for WordPress.com blogs. Just email a secret address and the formatting will be taken care of.
• Infinite Scroll — Users can now get rid of “next” and “back” pagination buttons and load new pages dynamically and infinitely instead. For this feature to work, your theme needs to support it.

For me, the real jewel is the Publicize feature. Couple that with the ability to add share buttons to posts and pages and WordPress.org sites can be quickly configured to share socially almost out of the box.