WP.me – WordPress.com Launches Short URLs

If you’ve got a WordPress.com blog, you’ll be pleased to know you can now share an itsy-bitsy-WordPress linky to each of your posts.

That’s right: WordPress has launched the WP.me short URL, designed for linking to your blog posts from space-limited sites like Twitter. It isn’t a general purpose URL shortener or rival to Bit.ly: it’s just for those on WordPress.com.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg writes of the launch:

-WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.

-Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.

-These are all exposed in the using rel=shortlink.

-It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.

-The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.

-WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.

All of which is great, but raises the question: now microblogging has surpassed personal blogging, how does WordPress keep up? We haven’t heard much about Prologue, their self-hosted chat/microblog-thingy since its launch in early 2008. Does the personal blogging titan plan to take a real shot at the microblogs space? If so, how?