The savvy software savants at Automattic -- creators of the open-source WordPress blogging platform -- have launched a new group blogging tool called Prologue.
Prologue lets users give quick status updates to others in their group. You can see a demo of Prologue on their site. Keep in mind that only invited members can post. Like any WordPress blog, Prologue has fine-grained privacy settings, so you can make posts visible to the public or only invited members. You can also turn commenting off if you wish.
Looks a lot like Twitter, doesn't it? As WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg mentions in his blog post about Prologue, he and his co-workers are all huge Twitter fans. The micro-blogging service was definitely the inspiration here. The Automattic team is currently using Prologue to keep everyone aware of what everyone else is working on.
One of my own "problems" with Twitter is the fact that everything's public. There are no private, invite-only Twitter networks, which is sort of the point. But it also reduces the flexibility of the platform. What if I want to share short status updates with only a select crew of friends? I have to use something else. Luckily, Prologue fills that hole nicely.
And yes, Prologue is just a theme for WordPress. It's easy to get set up, and it still has much of the same functionality of any other WordPress installation.
