For anyone who might not have been following Dave Winer's work, or thought streams in the recent past, the reference to blogging like it's 1999 isn't about the tech. It's primary concept is about it going back to the roots of being about openness. Instead of blogging on all the closed platforms, Dave has always advocated for blogging on your own terms. Whether from wordpress, ghost, or his new tool, it's all the same level of importance in keeping the open web alive.
A lot of his focus in this product is likely to be around the ease of editing and ease of getting your content out there. For example, it comes with support for instant articles built in. I imagine things like Amp page support will also get built in.
Re the twitter login. It's not something I personally believe in, but I know that Dave has a strong belief in Twitter having potential to be much better as a dev platform of sorts. From identity management, to message delivery. Debatable, but for another time. Just thought I could help provide some context here.
Whether this platform is better than WP, Drupal, or Ghost is all a matter of personal preference honestly. I'm not sure Dave really cares about it that way either. He just wants to keep making the open web more appealing than the closed.
Of everything in this announcement so far, the most intriguing part is his idea of interop with WP and Drupal and other platforms. One thing I can connect it with, is how his posts cross post to FB, and Medium. And he's talked about live editing a bit over there. If I recall right, Dave kind of imagines a future where the editor and the server are different. So I might edit things on my 1999.io server while the updates are all served on a WP or Drupal site. A bit more context to this. In the past Dave also wrote about wishing the Medium.com experience was more like that. Where I could use their incredible editor and publish to anywhere I wanted instead of just medium.com.
The one thing and "maybe" criticism I have of Dave's stuff, is that it is very high level/abstract at times. I've followed his work for years, and it's always taken me a while to digest any of his ideas because there's a lot of imagination that goes unsaid there. In many ways this is like the wonderful work he's done in creating RSS too. RSS alone is simply a germ of an idea which can then be used in so many creative ways. Dave's ideas are very similar. A germ of an idea that he hopes others will pick up on and push forward. New frontiers!