You Can Have WordPress.com Features on Your Blog Now

As most of you guys probably know WordPress.com is the hosted version of the WordPress software. You can sign-up for a free account there and get a blog with an address like yourblog.wordpress.com.

While I don’t recommend the hosted version (because by hosting the software yourself you have much more control and flexibility), WordPress.com used to offer some exclusive and very useful features. The good news is that Automattic just released a WordPress plugin called Jetpack that will bring all those features to self-hosted WordPress blogs as well.

Here is a list of the features:

• Stats: Simple, concise site stats with no additional load on your server.
• Twitter Widget: Display the latest updates from a Twitter user inside your theme’s widgets.
• Gravatar Hovercards: Show a pop-up business card of your users’ Gravatar profiles in comments.
• WP.me Shortlinks: Enable WP.me-powered shortlinks for all of your Posts and Pages for easier sharing.
• Sharedaddy: The most super duper sharing tool on the interwebs. Share content with Facebook, Twitter, and many more.
• LaTeX: Mark up your posts with the LaTeX markup language, perfect for complex mathematical equations and other über-geekery.
• After the Deadline: After the Deadline helps you write better by adding spell, style, and grammar checking to WordPress.
• Shortcode Embeds: Easily embed videos and more from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare.

There are more features coming soon, so definitely keep an eye on that plugin. The decision to release that plugin to all WordPress users also signals Automattic’s care about the whole WordPress community, not just those using the hosted version, which is a very positive thing.