Prologue: Sort of Twittermattic

Interested in something that resembles Twitter for groups? I wouldn’t normally be, since I don’t really get Twitter.

But Prologue comes from Automattic, an organization I’m interested in, so I did see Matt’s announcement post, and I did read posts remarking on the announcement. Here’s the enthusiastic Allen Stern: “if you have multiple bloggers on your WordPress blog, you can now use Twitter-like short messages to chat internally… With WordPress the dominant player in blogging, this could be a game changer.”

Duncan at TechCrunch responds: Nah. It’s a reasonable enough idea, but… But he does seem to agree with Adam that the most interesting part of Matt’s post is:

Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to.

I think that Prologue is a smart move by Automattic. It apparently took only a few person-days to write. It’s implemented as a WordPress theme, and hence can be used at any WordPress site (including WordPress.com, right away). So for a fairly small investment, Automattic demonstrates WordPress as a platform, and opens (GPL-related pun intended) the possibility of something like Twitter, but more business-friendly, being built on that platform.

It has also generated a lot of Techmeme fodder. By the way, my favorite Prologue post so far is the one from Mashable Mark, who describes Prologue as “a re-invention of the wheel… that has legs.”

Finally, Prologue demonstrates that someone at Automattic can spell.