Prologue is More Than We Are Considering

January 31, 2008 · Comments

prologue
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

“Twitter for Wordpress” is what people have been calling Matt Mullenweg’s latest project, and lots of great folks have weighed in on this. But I have a different opinion.

Prologue is (almost) Twitter BEHIND the Firewall

It’s actually spelled out by Mullenweg a little further down the page:

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.

Install WordPress on a web server inside the firewall, build accounts for your colleagues, and you’ve solved the “private implementation” of Twitter. Almost.

Multi-Modal

Twitter can be accessed by a mobile browser (maybe Prologue is nicely formatted for mobile?). Twitter is accessible via SMS. (Is there a hack for that yet?) Twitter is accessible by IM client and/or 3rd party apps.

So, one little piece is missing.

Will Enterprises Go With It Anyway?

I would. In a heartbeat. I think it’s a great implementation for short messages like status and the like inside the firewall. I think it’s a great step in that direction, and as WordPress has tons of other extensions and hacks, it’s the kind of thing you can imagine getting to the other missing parts of Twitter.

Without Hype

Remember, this is just a blog theme. Nothing under the hood is much different than blogging. And yet, it’s something that gives us a new perspective, and a potential something to offer clients who want short status messaging inside the workplace.

What do YOU think?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Tagged as: , , , ,

ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress

Thesis WordPress theme

Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.

With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like ChrisBrogan.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.

  • Fully agree with you @chrisbrogan
  • This theme is genius! When I read Matt M's post I immediately activated it to check it out, and already have a couple ideas of how small groups I'm involved with could use it.

    The difficulty in posting from the road is an issue I'm sure someone will solve soon- you can still read it via RSS of course. But the impressive thing about Prologue is how it got people to look at multi-user blogs in a new way. Genius :).
  • Agreed. The real beauty is this is just a theme but it opens up so much more.

    I sounds like it was something they decided to whip up, so was the win just by accident or was there more planning involved.
  • I think there is a lot more to prologue

    I'm looking at using a plugin that automatically serves up legible content with a different iPhone-optimised theme.

    I'm also thinking about its use at meetups and conferences where the delegates can share swap and network, and then the results can be opened up to outside world, or it can include people who can't physically be there, or for interview Q&A sessions.

    As you say, it's just a theme - but, like twitter it's brilliantly simple - and very mashable / flexible / extendible.
  • I haven't played with it yet (never enough time!), but I'm wondering: There are already plugins for wordpress to use Twitter from WP. Now, Prologue tweets inside the wall. Isn't this just the classic intra/internet setup? Couldn't the two be tied together and internal and external communications be determined by user rights, system policies, etc.? Twitlogue? Pritter?

    I think this could be very useful in many areas, I only wish I had the time to play with this stuff. ;-)
  • Edward Kustoff
    Coming from a corporate world, I would have loved to have that available. Its a great concept, like David P. said, based on its brilliant simplicity.
  • I am in the process of setting up an enterprise type twitter style private group blog at work. I have the blessing of the CEO, now we are going to try and piece it together and how it would help every employee in the company. It will be a private wordpress blog using the new prologue

    Going to either have everyone (all 14 employees) get wordpress logins and join and try and use feed demon for reading the private RSS feed. Used mostly for status updates and whats going on in departments, who is out on a service call. Things that we use email for way too much. I am very excited about it.

    One thing is that you can post to a blog using jott.com so there is your quick non sms update.
  • UPDATE: I've set up Prologue theme on a blog at http://also.cc

    Do register to try it out for yourself, and add to the debate.

    Actually, it's a pretty good domain name for testing out the concept of group contact without email CC - "Hey, make sure you also CC David on that one..." ;-)

    @Tim - took me les than 6 minutes to download, install the theme and customise! Get with the program! 352 seconds!

    @Christian - Why not try OpenID logins?
  • Part of me thinks Prologue is great but another part of me, especially after reading this post, thinks that Campfire is a much more idea solution.

    Especially for a corporate environment, Campfire might present a lower threshold of learning for a greater number of people and it's tied in well with all the other project management aspects of Basecamp.

    Finally, 37s just released a slick iPhone interface for it.
  • Great perspective on Prologue! I think it would greatly benefit some of the startups and blog communities that use Twitter.
  • yep, I see a use for it. Those snowy day where everybody works from home. I can live without the mobile option. IM would be nice.

    Keren
  • The problem that Prologue is solving - a password protected twitter 'behind the firewall' for a distinct group of contributors - wouldn't even be an issue if Twitter supported groups (similar to Pownce). The reason Twitter isn't ideal is because when you write your 140 characters its broadcast to everyone - your drinking buddies, your uncomfortable and aggressive acquaintances, your rec league, etc. If Twitter had groups you could create the dedicated 'coworker' channel and only send work related stuff for that and 'viola!' you'd be serving the exact purpose that this custom wordpress theme is trying to solve (only with SMS and IM support).
  • I'm still wondering what all this buzz is about... But it sure looks cool and thus will give it a try :)
  • If you're looking to replicate Twitter's cellphone functionality in a hack-ish sort of way, try these quick tips:

    - Publish posts from your cellphone using WordPress's email-to-post feature (assuming it could be used by multiple authors; not sure on that one)

    - Receive posts on your cellphone using an RSS-to-SMS service (such as Pingie.com)
  • I believe almost all decent organizations use some or the other IM client within their organizations. Even if they don't communicating between people can be very simple even through DOS commands!
    Every company has mailing facility within the organization and I would believe that is till now the preferred medium of communication.

    This does offer several other possibilities and one can explore those, but I somehow do not think it can replace the things that are already being used.

    Having said that, this is still a very nice thing, innovative and interesting.
  • I have modified Prologue and now use it as my Twitter client to tag my own Tweets. I will release a version once I have cleaned up the code a bit more.
  • I'm gonna see what this thing looks like a bit later. Maybe bring out my own version. Can't W8.
  • Can Pownce be used for something like this?

    Setting up a WP blog "behind a firewall" does not sound like the easiest solution.

    I've wanted a similar suite of apps for small teams for a while now, i.e.:
    * broadcast/share Twitter-style updates with your team
    * share pertinent links via a private delicious-style feed

    I guess basically a Basecamp Lite.
  • Looks like the twitter guys should crack open a book on enterprise pub sub. If not for the social stickiness a Twitter implementation based on a federation of ActiveMQ servers would work wonders. Prologue is just a list, a multi user blog. The short comings would become apparent soon enough. Email lists do the job really well, but the UI is god awful. I like prologue, but it is what it is; blogging isn't messaging. I think what Prologue shows is that there is still a ton of opportunity to take the Twitter model to new places with new tools. It all starts with a reliable messaging solution and then go from there.
  • Pete Au
    At first I felt really sceptical about this tool. But now, I see it's potential. It could be useful and could actually save up some time. But it would be important to make all your team memers use it, otherwise it will be useless. Anyway, all by itself it's just a nice add-inn, that I would probably like to see in my collaboration tool - Wrike (http://www.wrike.com)
  • walesmd
    This theme has set of a flurry of ideas in my head. Earlier this week I put together a team consisting of Elliot Haughin, Dylan Wreggelsworth, and myself to take the concepts from Prologue and make it possible to turn any Wordpress blog into a "node" within a distributed messaging system.

    It is our hope that your blog will soon become your preferred method of communication - from global shouts to the entire world to private messages to other users, no matter what domain they are on.

    Of course, blogs that utilize a Prologue-functional theme will have a few extra features (as their blog is merely a messaging center) and we'll be releasing quite a few Prologue-functional themes our selves. We'd really like to promote Wordpress as a messaging system, since more people following that line of thinking would bring more people into our service.

    We'll be burning the midnight oil this weekend in hopes to have a very basic level of functionality complete this weekend.
  • I'm really surprised this hasn't been done before; I can see many variations of this concept on Wordpress coming in the near future. It really is a great idea :)
  • I jumped right on this with http://42words.wordpress.com
    In comments to a couple of blog posts I pointed out a couple of (painfully obvious) shortcomings, i.e. pages seemed to have been disabled, and categories were totally frabbed.

    Lo! and Behold! Those got fixed post haste and at the same time the functional logic was shot right behind the ear i.e. the whole freakin' idea was to show "only most recent from each contributer".
    Because (Wooo, lots of people have total control?) some people didn't get it, this was dropped.

    So now Prologue is /nothing but/ a theme.

    You wrote "Nothing under the hood is much different than blogging." That was not initially true. It was a different functionality.
    People didn't get it?
    Well fine, people didn't get Twitter ... should we shoot Twitter behind the ear?

    I'm very disappointed to see how this turned out.

    NB: because it went stright from broken to fixed but de-twittered, we didn't get a chance to grab an interim version, one that had the twitterized functionality c/w pages and working categories.

    --bentrem

    p.s. boy, there's a really wierd discussion dynamic ... some folk have huge say while others don't even get their comments moderated. this just so you know what I'm talking about when I tweet about "A-list dynamics" and personality politics.

    "Don't be lucid and ironic; people will turn it against you saying, ''Ah, you see? He isn't a nice perso.''" --Albert Camus
  • using the plug-ins registered-only in conjunction with subscribe2 to create an e-mail digest driven private communication system. works pretty well.
  • I like it, but find it restrictive for my pourposes.
    Would be very good for me if it could:
    a) handle more than 15 team members (maybe an ability to set max users to display - based on latest post?)

    b) More importantly, more than one group?

    I suppose what I’m really after is a way to have a fully fledged chat type plugin, with multiple rooms or channels?

    That would be fantastic for making WP a ‘Social’ platform, especially with WP-MU.

    In the meantime for those unaware; you can use this theme in conjuction with TwitterTools by Alex King.
    That will solve being able to update whilst 'on-the-road'.

    I tried it and works great: two-way posting, either from Twitter or WP.

    - Vince
  • One very important advantage Prologue has over Twitter, apart from the inside-the-firewall stuff, is the simple fact that it's less likely to be down half the time. It can be set up as an in-house app, which means you're not depending on third parties.

    That alone makes it worthwile in an environment where Twitter clearly isn't (yet).
  • joec0914
    Chris, I've been doing some writing about Distributed Twitter and would love to hear your take on it. This post of yours on Prologue is closely related. http://tinyurl.com/6j7x79
  • i came here from google's search on prologue and i thank you for the info!

    the only thing that discouraging me from using wordpress and prologue on a twitter like site, is the slow proccess i noticed on extending it but if i'll find anything usefull, i will return to you!
blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post: Social Media Changes Lives Directly

Next post: Screencast of Google Reader