Over three million downloads later, we’re excited to report that the community has embraced this seemingly impossible vision for combining the best of hosted and non-hosted WordPress. This tenth release brings some of the most-asked-for features into the hands of millions of Jetpackers.

Publicize to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr…

You no longer have to jump through hoops and developer portals to connect your blog to your friends on your favorite social networks. Through Jetpack and your WordPress.com account, you can connect to each network with just a few clicks and broadcast to your audiences and followers across several networks, making WordPress your true digital hub. Activate Publicize from the main Jetpack page in your dashboard, then go to Settings → Sharing to add social sharing connections.

Post by Email

If you live in Gmail, Outlook, your BlackBerry, or just find it easiest to email on the go, you’ll love the new Post by Email feature. Email anything to your secret address — a photo, a video, a bunch of photos, an audio file, ten pages of single-spaced text — and we’ll figure out how to make it beautiful and put it on your blog literally within seconds after you send it. Combined with Publicize and the previously-released Subscriptions module, that post will go out to all your friends including ones that subscribe via email, completing the loop of email / blog nirvana. To set up your special address go to Users → Your Profile in your dashboard and click the “Enable Post By Email” button.

Photon Your Images

Have you ever switched themes to find that full-width images break out of the layout and no longer fit your theme? Are you frustrated that images on your blog take too long to load? Jetpack Photon fixes all of that by making the advanced image acceleration and image editing service from WordPress.com available to the broader WordPress community, essentially making every image a fully dynamic object that themes and plugins can transform to their heart’s content without killing your server. In fact, if you enable Photon, you will see your CPU and bandwidth usage plummet as images are served through the global WordPress.com cloud, meaning less load on your host and faster images for your users.

Infinite Scroll

Infinite Scroll brings the future of reading on the web to your website. Speed and performance are key, and Infinite Scroll loads new content quickly without a full-page refresh. Instead of the old way of navigating down a page — by scrolling and then clicking a link to get to the next page and waiting for the page to refresh — infinite scrolling pulls the next set of posts into view automatically when the reader approaches the bottom of the page. Your theme needs support for this to work. There are already several themes in the directory with Jetpack Infinite Scroll support and theme authors will find documentation for adding it to any theme on jetpack.me.

Onwards…

Jetpack 2.0 isn’t just about shiny new things, we’ve also fixed dozens of bugs and under-the-hood things to keep Jetpack one of the smoothest running, most secure, and most stable plugins out there.

I want to personally thank all of the members of the Jetpack community who have shared countless hours of testing, feedback, and criticism. Your thoughts and passion have made the plugin immeasurably better than it would have been otherwise, and rest assured we’re still listening closely to your feedback around better stats, module activation and deactivation, developer mode, translation, and documentation.

However maybe doubling is easier. In the past 4 months Jetpack has doubled its downloads and flown past 2 million downloads from WordPress.org, tripling its growth in just a few short months.

What’s putting extra fuel in the Jetpack? Updates, of course. We’ve shipped three major new feature releases that have seen huge adoption — contact forms, Jetpack comments, and carousels — in just the first half of this year, in addition to dozens of smaller features, and there is lots more on its way. (Maybe even something this week. )

Any bets for when we’ll reach 4 million?

For fun:

• If the monitor you are looking at now has a resolution of 1280 x 800, that’s 1,024,000 pixels
• A million seconds = 11.57 days
• There are a million drops of water in a liter
• A million is also an addictive fresh spicy leathery fragrance 

We recently released a new version, Jetpack 1.2.4,  with some minor bug fixes. You can download it here or through your WordPress Dashboard.

First, kudos to everyone who downloaded our unique plugin and spread the word. Also double bonus thanks to those who reported issues on the first releases to Jetpack Support - given the many web hosting providers in the world, and the complexity of how authentication works, it’s impossible to cover them all without your help.

If you haven’t yet, please install the latest release (1.1.2), which should appear as an upgrade in your dashboard if you have a previous version. Then please rate Jetpack on the main plugin site, and score us for compatability on the version of WordPress you are using.

The future:  the Jetpack mission is to continually bring features currently only available on WordPress.com to the rest of the WordPress community. Beyond the recent bug fix releases, we’re investigating WordPress.com’s most popular features and how to engineer them to work inside Jetpack. I can’t say more, but it’s fair to say version 1.2 is likely to contain something impressive – something  no ordinary plugin can currently do.

Meanwhile, if you could have your wish, what WordPress.com feature would you want to see in Jetpack 1.2? Leave us a comment.

On dot-com in just a few clicks you’re set up on a web-scale centralized platform that constantly gets new upgrades and features. And you never have to worry about it because it’s completely hassle-free and completely supported by our happiness team.

On dot-org you sign up and host your blog with a hosting company and you get complete control over every aspect of your plugins and code, but you also have the responsibility of maintaining it and adding anything new you want to try.

What if you could have the best of both worlds?

Enter Jetpack. Today we’re launching the first version of what’s been a dream of mine for several years now, really since my State of the Word presentation in 2009: a way to provide feature parity between WordPress.com and WordPress.org for everybody.

Our users have been banging down the door for this. Every time we launch something new on WP.com the first question is always asking how people can get it for their self-hosted blog. Now you can have your cake and eat it too — host your own blog, completely under your control and with the freedom of the GPL, and still get all the cloud goodies of our hosted service. It’s the best of both worlds, the decentralized and the centralized, the control and the convenience, the peanut butter and the chocolate.

In short, it’s the vision I had for WordPress when I first founded Automattic five years ago finally coming to fruition (and from an amazing team). And we’re thrilled to be joined by great partners as well — Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, and Network Solutions are launch partners. The one-click WordPress installs on all the largest web hosts in the world are now Jetpack-enabled, which means that the vast majority of people experiencing WordPress for the first time will have a seamless Jetpack experience.

For launch we’ve brought eight of the most-requested features into Jetpack as one easy bundle: Hovercards, Stats, After the Deadline, Twitter widget, shortcodes, shortlinks, easy Facebook/Twitter/WordPress sharing buttons (Sharedaddy), and for our fellow math nerds, . We’re excited about this initial set of features, but we’re even more excited for what’s coming down the road.

We hope you join us for the ride. You can download Jetpack immediately, and learn more about the features, from Jetpack.me. We also encourage you to check out our FAQ page, and if there’s anything you still are wondering drop us a comment below.

(Mozilla Jetpack is a wonderful, but entirely unrelated, open source project run by Mozilla Labs, which, if you know CSS/JavaScript, makes it easier than ever to improve Firefox. We checked with them first and we’re mutually cool on the name.)

Download and get your Jetpack today.

See some additional coverage on TechCrunch, The Next Web, WP Candy.