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This week’s news that WordPress.org and WordPressMU.org are merging is VERY big, even though it might not seem so at first.  source

I think this indicates a significant change in the WordPress direction. There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of active WordPress driven websites out there; what WordPress.org does inevitably shapes the web.

It seems to me that the WordPress CMS is changing from an “instant-on blogging platform” to an “instant-on open social network framework”. One that uses open protocols and may even be getting ready to play nice with wave.google.com, which could very well be the future of ALL social media platforms.

I’ve been playing around with Buddypress.org recently and I think whatever it becomes over the next 18 months is what will replace “blogs” over most of the web.

Since WordPress might be integrating the best of buddypress, WordPress.com will become much more like Facebook soon. Being able to instantly “spawn” your own “Facebook” that connects and syncs with any other WordPress setup on the web (and other SM like twitter, flickr and Facebook) will be what someone might call the “post-blogosphere”.

Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Flickr are all great, but they are at their core very similar to AOL in 1999. A walled garden that will inevitably choke itself to death.

The good news is the mainstream inside-out social network is coming very soon. One where semantic data & relationship links IS the network, not your list of users, and the more that linked network is open, the more value it will have. Just as the post AOL internet took all their users.

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I’ve started to hear a new buzzword out there… The Statusphere!

groan!

It’s suppose to refer to how short twitter/sms-like status updates are starting to replace blog posts and comments as way people share their thoughts across social networks.

I’ve been saying for the last year that users syncing updates across all socail platforms would be the big thing. Maybe I should start referring to it as everyone’s syncosphere? My syncopshere includes Twitter, Facebook, jasonprini.com, and my mobile device. But I have several syncospheres. For example workstudents.ca auto syncs updates with Facebook and Twitter, and can be easily pushed by users to other networks like LinkedIn.

But really, do we need these buzzwords at all? Maybe once “social media” jumps the chasm and turns back into just “media” again, we’ll be able to move on past these word-crutches. But probably not.