A Twitter post (fittingly enough) caught my eye and sent me to a Wordpress post in which newly-enriched founder Matt Mullenweg announced a Twitter-style group blog theme for Wordpress called Prologue. Although I’m sure some will see this as Automattic going after Twitter, I see it more as a tribute to the power of the viral messaging app. In effect, the theme is an attempt to replicate the kind of group activity stream and messaging function that Twitter does so well in the form of a blog.
I could see this being hugely useful for a group working on a project, as Matt describes in his post, as a way of keeping track of what everyone is doing — complete with tags that users can follow and RSS feeds built in. 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?
As Mark Hopkins notes in a post over at Mashable, this kind of thing is particularly interesting in light of what Dave Winer and some others have been saying about replicating Twitter in a more distributed fashion, to prevent the kind of outage it saw during Macworld. Now that I think about it, maybe Matt is thinking about going after Twitter :-)
