Updated: Why Use Twitter When You Can Make Your Own Microblogging Network With WordPress Prologue?

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Quick Summary: The WordPress Prologue theme from Automattic may be the first step towards an open-source distributed micro-blogging platform.

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WordPress creator Automattic has launched a new theme called Prologue which can be used to create private Twitter-like micro-blogging platforms.

Basically, the Prologue theme uses the WordPress content management system to mimic the Twitter interface. Here are three reasons why I like Prologue –

(+) The “whatcha up to?” post form integrated into the front page is nifty for posting short tweet-sized messages. It would be useful, however, to have a “title” field apart from “post” and “tags”.

(+) The theme is built to be used by multiple authors (see demo blog) and author-wise RSS feeds are useful for linking each author’s posts to their Twitter accounts, via TwitterFeed.

(+) The summary view on the front page, expandable by clicking on authors or tags, is a neat touch. The front page now shows a stream of recent updates instead of one update per user.

I have already started a basic Prologue personal microblog. The plan is to exclusively post updates at my Prologue microblog and update my Twitter account via TwitterFeed. Once I integrate the “@gauravonomics” Twitter search feed in the sidebar, I’ll won’t even need to visit Twitter anymore. I really like how is possible to track all your Twitter activity on the Prologue sidebar using RSS feeds from Twitter. I have integrated RSS feeds for @gauravonomics replies on Twitter, people I’m following on Twitter and search feeds for “social media” and “Mumbai/ Bombay” and I’m thinking of even more interesting ways to design the sidebar. This personal microblog application of Prologue will work for people who primarily tweet from the web and use Twitter more for posting and replying to @username messages than for reading other people’s tweets.

The other useful application of Prologue is as a private password-protected microblogging network inside an enterprise.

As a completely virtual company with no two people in the same place every day, we often have trouble keeping up with each other, so we’re going to be using a password-protected Prologue that only Automattic employees can access as one of our methods of communication, much like some other companies use Basecamp. — Matt Mullenweg

You’re a group of 8 people working on something that’s going to change the world, and you’re always looking for new collaborative things that are going to make your team more productive and keep them together. You have Basecamp, where you post long company memos and ideas. You have e-mail which you use to get stuff done and keep in tap with each other for the important, must-document things. You have IM to keep in constant ping. And last but not the least, you have Facebook. Will you have a use for something like Prologue? It depends, but I can’t see why you wouldn’t not want to give it a try. — Sid Yadav

The biggest value of Prologue, however, lies in hacking it to build a customized, self-hosted group microblog for 10 to 20 users focused on a narrow topic, let’s say social media in India. While Mark Hopkins makes a valid point in his review –

I can’t help but wonder if this is a re-invention of the wheel. Twitter already has a number of ways to access public tweets, either by the API or the RSS feeds. It wouldn’t take much to make an overlay management system that would aggregate the tweets of a group and publish them to the web. — Mark Hopkins at Mashable!

– Prologue makes it easy to create such a group microblog.

The big question, of course, is whether Prologue is a Twitter-killer –

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. Matt Mullenweg

While it’s pretty clear that the WordPress team isn’t going to take the lead in driving towards this direction – as Automattic chief executive Toni Schneider tells us “we really like Twitter. We’re not trying to compete with those guys” – it is certainly possible that Prologue or micro status updates in general could become a central part of blogging and other collaborative writing tools. Could WordPress be used as an open platform, like Twitter? Schneider says theoretically, yes. All you do is is create a registration page, and you can let outsiders sign up on your blog, and it could become a universal Twitter-like service. — MG Siegler

While I see Prologue’s possibilities, I agree with Duncan Riley that Prologue is not (yet) a Twitter-killer –

Prologue may provide some open access, but its distributed nature will mean that ultimately it will be a niche product; possibly a good niche product, but it’s not going to knock the Twitter bird off its perch any time soon. — Duncan Riley at TechCrunch

– because of three fundamental limitations –

(-) It is not built to support postings and notifications for IM, SMS and WAP.

(-) It doesn’t tap into the community aspect of micro-blogging.

(-) It doesn’t have a rich eco-system of API-based tools.

But Prologue is only the first step towards a distributed microblogging platform and all these limitations may be fixed soon.

Mathew Ingram asks a very important question –

It doesn’t benefit from the same kind of network effects as Twitter does, of course, because it’s restricted to a group of people who all use the same blog. But what if there was a way to tie those types of posts together with others from other Twitter-style blogs? — Mathew Ingram

The next step is a Technorati-like aggregator for micro-blogs — Microrati, anyone?

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Update: February 1, 2008

Based on feedback received on Prologue, Automattic has already released an updated version of Prologue.

Here are some other interesting perspectives on Prologue — Tris Hussey, Andy Beal, Joseph Scott, Allen Stern, Chris Brogan, Jesse Stay, Dennis Howlett and Brij Singh.

Here are the first set of Prologue powered microblogs — Gauravonomics, Bentrem, Greywulf, David Petherick, Mike Waters, Joseph Scott, Bwana, YouthTwitter.

Do drop in a link in the comments below, if you have started an interesting WordPress Prologue powered microblog.

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