Even before the acquisition was officially announced this morning, on onslaught of users importing Tumblr blogs to WordPress already began. That is, at least, according to WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.

He writes, “Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.”

Despite what would appear to be a mass exodus of users leaving Tumblr for WordPress, Mullenweg appears to think that’s not the case. After he initially wrote the post, he updated it to say, “Some people are reading too much into the import numbers — I don’t think there will be an exodus from Tumblr.”

He then pointed readers to the comments on this post, where he said, “I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups.”

Even still, other blogging platforms are likely to get a little bump out of this.

According to a recent report from Pingdom, WordPress’ share of the world’s top blogs has already been on the rise.

According to the firm, 52% of these blogs are using WordPress, up from 48% a year ago.

To come up with the top blogs, Pingdom looked to Technorati, which is famous for its annual State of the Blogosphere report, which has transformed into the “Digital Influence Report“. It’s worth noting that Pingdom was only able to identify the platform in use by 94 out of 100 sites.

As you can see, the next largest piece of the pie comes from custom systems, followed by Drupal, N/A, Gawker, BlogSmith, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, Ceros, Joomla, and Tumblr.

Considering Tumblr’s rising popularity in recent months, it’s interesting to see it carry such a small percentage here (1 site).

TypePad has increased from two sites to four sites, while Movable Type decreased from seven to four. Drupal dropped by one site. Google’s Blogger gained one site, reaching three.

Here’s the list of blogs, and which platform each uses:

According to the company, you can scale your traffic as your content goes viral, and it can handle it. WordPress’ network does handle 100s of millions of pageviews each day.

The offering comes with all of the built-in WordPress.com VIP features, including over 70 plugins, including integrations with Flipboard, Chartbeat, Facebook, etc.

“To top it off, you also get our new Javascript customization service that allows you the flexibility to customize your site without needing to touch the underlying PHP code. You can tweak and personalize to your heart’s content,” says Automattic’s Raanan Bar-Cohen.

Automattic has worked with Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Chef, ESPN’s Digital and Print Products, Soleil Moon Frye’s Moonfrye.com, and The Crosby Press from JackThreads for the beta.

WPBeginner found a ticket on the WordPress Web site that points to blogrolls being removed in the next major update (3.5). The ticket refers to two possible solutions for the removal of the blogroll and the pros and cons of each action:

Hide the menu. For new installs, stop inserting default links and hide the menu, only. (Also the default widget.) For old installs, remove default links if those are the only ones they have. Hide the menu if they have no links. In this situation, we could make it so the menu does remain accessible, which means they could go in, insert a link, and suddenly the feature would come back to life.

Pros: Focuses on our main goal here, which is UI bloat.

Cons: Ignores code bloat and required future maintenance of essentially dead code.

Move everything to a plugin. For new installs, everything is gone. No more table, no more API. For old installs, on upgrade, install a compatibility plugin that contains the API, if they have any links. Remove the table on upgrade if they don’t have any links beyond the default one.

Pros: Handles both UI and code bloat in one big swing.

Cons: Backwards compatibility nightmare. Functions are removed rather than deprecated. Even just truncating these functions and conditionally defining them could result in fatal errors from plugins expecting different return values. Sites not relying on the automatic upgrade could break.

Either way, it seems that WordPress is pretty serious about ditching it. The good news is that people who were already using blogrolls won’t have their links deleted. New users, however, will not have access to the functionality.

Of course, we do have to ask if blogrolls are even worth it? WPBeginner feels that WordPress Menus are a perfectly suitable replacement. They perform all the functions of the blogroll and then some. That being said, Andrew Nacin has created a plug-in for WordPress that will keep the blogroll intact. You can grab it here.

• Activity Feed: Shows readers their friends’ activity on the site, such as likes and comments.
• Recommendations: Gives readers personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like, as well as a Recommendations Bar option to give users the option to add content to their Timeline as they read.
• Customizable Like, Subscribe and Send buttons
• Comments Box: Makes it easy for people to comment on your site and post back to Facebook, and includes moderation tools. The plugin also features automatic SEO support for Facebook Comments, so search engines can index them to improve your site’s visibility.

Emphasis added.

While the comments plugin has been around a while, I find it noteworthy that Facebook is touting the “SEO support” as a selling point.

If you go to Facebook’s page for the Comments plugin, the company says:

How can I get an SEO boost from the comments left on my site?

The Facebook comments box is rendered in an iframe on your page, and most search engines will not crawl content within an iframe. However, you can access all the comments left on your site via the graph API as described above. Simply grab the comments from the API and render them in the body of your page behind the comments box. We recommend you cache the results, as pulling the comments from the graph API on each page load could slow down the rendering time of the page.

As we’ve seen in the past, Facebook comments on your site can show up in Google search results. That said, the search value of comments, in general, is debatable. A while back, we spoke with Shoemoney’s Jeremy Schoemaker, who spoke with a Google engineer friend about blog comments.

This was pre-Penguin update, when much of the industry focus was still on the Panda update. It was (may still be) worth considering how comments might impact a page’s quality in terms of how Panda looks at content.

According to Schoemaker, the Google engineer indicated that if anything, it’s “diluting the quality score of my page” by possibly diluting overall keyword density. Another factor could be the few common comments that go through that are clearly spam send signals that the page is not being well maintained.

“So he said he did not see a positive to leaving indexable comments on my site,” Schoemaker told us.

Of course, no Google employee knows everything about Google. That’s not to say this person didn’t know what they were talking about, but one Googler recently indicated that Google didn’t have anything called Penguin. It’s just wise to keep a grain of salt on you with these types of things.

Facebook announced today that they are making a Facebook for WordPress plugin publicly available. So why is it being announced by Facebook and not WordPress? Facebook engineers created the plugin to bring the Facebook experience to WordPress. In an awesome move, the plugin also works with the mobile version of WordPress.

The Facebook for WordPress plugin is really similar to what you would find on an app that utilizes Open Graph. Like Open Graph, the plugin allows you to cross-post content between WordPress and your Facebook Timeline including any other Facebook pages that you may own. You can also enter specific names for pages or friends before publishing on WordPress and it will deliver your post to the appropriate profiles.

Facebook also released a number of widgets on WordPress including Activity Feed, Recommendations, Customizable Like, Subscribe and Send buttons, and Comments Box. All of these aim to make your WordPress site more social and visible to those who also use Facebook. An example would be using the Activity Feed plugin which shows people what their friends are liking and sharing on the site.

While the new Facebook for WordPress plugin is definitely available and usable by the general blog owning populace, the true potential of this plugin can be seen for businesses. It’s mentioned that WordPress powers 16.6 percent of the Web and that’s not just personal blogs. Pretty much every blog styled Web site out there uses WordPress and this plugin should help them reach a larger audience.

It’s pretty easy to install the Facebook for WordPress plugin, but here’s a handy tutorial if you’re new to this. If you already know how to install plugins, you can download it right now and get to sharing your WordPress content with the world, or the world as defined by your Facebook page.

“The first thing you’ll notice is that there is no number,” explains Andy Skelton of WordPress. “We axed it out of compassion. It all boils down to how people feel about inboxes. In giving you a notifications stream, the last thing we wanted to do was cause more stress! So we dropped the unread count and now the orange color simply means there are new notes since you last looked. An icon shows the type of your latest notification. The icon now also refreshes while you’re on a page, no need to reload a page to see new notifications.”

“You might also notice that unread notes are still white until you open them, which turns them gray. We didn’t entirely remove the concept of read/unread; we just stopped counting them. Feel free to turn them all gray if that’s your thing, or let some notes stay unread. Either way, we won’t pester you with a number.”

Here’s what the toolbar button looks like:

From the Notifications tab, you can scroll back through older notifications, and WordPress says it will be adding more features, as well as new notifications, for which the company says it has lots of ideas.

The changes don’t work with IE versions older than version 9.

The first aspect of the update is to automatically subscribe those who comment on a particular post. The official WordPress blog has the details:

• By default, posting a comment will now subscribe you to receive follow-up comments via email for that specific post, keeping you updated on the conversation. This is indicated by the checked box in the comment form.
• If you have a WordPress.com account, you now have a global setting to change this so that by default you will not be subscribed…
• If you don’t want email notifications for a thread, just uncheck the box when you post your comment. If you’ve disabled the feature, you can also subscribe to a specific thread by checking the box in the comment form.
• There is also a link at the bottom of every notification email that will allow you to change your subscription options.

Essentially, if you comment, you’re subscribed. This includes email notifications when other readers respond to a post containing one of your comments. As the screenshot indicates, you can change what posts you follow every time you post a comment:

WordPress announced the new Friend Finder tool today. It allows users to find out which friends are using WordPress so they can follow their blogs for updates about their cats, jobs and even the family vacation that ended up ruined because they realized their father was actually Chevy Chase.

To use the new function, just authorize WordPress to have access to your Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts and WordPress will go sniffing. If you’re worried that WordPress will use your social contact information to spam you with sponsored posts and the like, worry not as the company vows not to save any of the information.

Once your friend list is up, just click Follow by the names of those people you wish to become more acquainted with through the magic of blogs. If you’re new to WordPress, these people will show up in the WordPress reader under Blogs I Follow.

If another friend is looking to add you, only your primary blog will be viewable by them in the Friend Finder. This is important for those of us who have multiple blogs. I care more about my video games blog so I will want my friends to see that instead of my music blog appropriately titled, “More Hipster Than You.”

I checked out the new application for myself and can confirm that it presented me with people that I had yet to add to my innocent WordPress stalking list. Funny enough, it turns out that I have more friends on Twitter using WordPress than either Facebook or Google. Regardless, the tool has helped me add 10 more friends to my follow list on WordPress. I can’t wait to forget their blog exists to only rediscover it a year later which leads to me spending five hours reading a year’s worth of blog entries.

Try it out for yourself to see if you have any better luck. Maybe you have more cool friends who use WordPress to tell other people about their lives and things they like.

With a host of plug-ins that allow for customization and a smooth integration with social media sites like Twitter and Flickr, it’s no wonder so many people have taken to WordPress. To really detail how much WordPress has grown recently, the folks at Yoast.com put together an infographic using data from Experian Hitwise that displays the staggering amount of traffic and popularity that the service enjoys every single day. After all, there’s a reason that WordPress is used by nearly half of the top 100 blogs in the world.

[Via Visual.ly.]

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