WordPress Prologue Theme could brings what’s missing to Twitter-Groups
January 28, 2008 by Tris Hussey
Filed under Business
Marshall Kirkpatrick and I were chatting tonight and he mentioned the new WP theme called “Prologue” that has some very Twitter-like features. We were also both musing how we were sitting chatting at DEMO while other folks were blogging it. Of course if you can’t be first–be smarter (I think Marshall might beat me in that department tonight).
From the WP.com blog, Matt let us know about this new theme and what it could be used for:
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. For WordPress.com users the theme is available in your “Presentation” section. From the WordPress.com blog
Matt is being too modest. Maybe too cagey. But really I think this brings something us that Twitter lacks–affinity groups. Yes, I know Pownce has them, but man are they hard to manage. Imagine this, you have a descent-sized company. You don’t really want to use Twitter for everything, but man it’s useful for a lot of things isn’t it? What if you had a WPMU-based blog for the company … okay maybe just WP. But you have blogs with different groups … HR, IT, General, For Sale, etc. You just leave your comment on each of these blogs … heck you wouldn’t have to even contribute to any or all of these blogs, just follow the RSS feeds. Pretty darn powerful.
Allen Stern, I think, is on the right track with his post:
With Wordpress the dominant player in blogging, this could be a game changer. What makes it interesting? Check out the final comment by Matt in the announcement, “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. For WordPress.com users the theme is available in your “Presentation” section.” “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey goodbye” Says WordPress To Twitter | CenterNetworks
Now…I think I need to test this somewhere.
Other folks talking about this: Mathew Ingram, Mashable
hey tris,
that’s a great find,
thanks!
Not really keeping to its original intention, but Prologue’s clean, white, iPhone friendly creative inspired me to build a Jakarta bar listings & review site:
http://www.jakartabar.com/
Innovative use of various WP comments plugins allow users to not just submit their reviews, but also ratings, as well as rate the reviews of other users.