I like them since for my personal site, they make sense.

I think this is key. WordPress has it’s origins in blogging, and for that Post Formats are great but still undervalued.

Post Formats allow for separating your blogging content that today we typically separate by third-party services. Think of them as a way to enabling different “views” of your blogged content: All your status items = Twitter. All your image items = Instagram.

I believe that they just never took off because they are commonly only used for formatting the output when you visit a blog but were not integrated into the bigger picture of consuming content.

I work on a plugin called Friends that attempts to enable you to consume the web in such a way: you use your own WordPress to subscribe content, and, if the subscribed site doesn’t use post formats, you can sort incoming content into such post formats.

So you’d then be able to see all of your friends’ status messages in one stream. All pictures in one stream. Or browse a mixed timeline.

There is another tangent to the plugin that allows you to connect with your friends’ blogs to allow for friend-only posts and avoiding spam by allowing just friends to comment, hence the name “Friends”.

What never really happened with blogging was to integrate consuming with publishing in a way that social platforms like Facebook do. I think it’d be a great idea for the web to come back to blogging and provide a more integrated experience.