Everyday it seems I get an email saying that someone is following me on Twitter.1 I’ve resisted using any of Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and Facebook status tools… much.
Now, I’m taking another look. Why? Because of the WordPress Prologue Theme.
If you haven’t heard about Prologue, it’s WordPress theme that people are calling a twitter for groups, created by the Automattic team: Matt, Joseph, and MT. It is available on WordPress.com or you can download it for your own WordPress install.
I’ll admit I thought it was a lot of excitement over nothing, but my nay saying didn’t diminish Matt’s enthusiasm. Then he announced Prologue, and everyone was really excited about it! The titles of the articles are quite telling, here are a few:
- Twitter - Public Timeline = Prologue
- WordPress’s Prologue: part Twitter, part Basecamp, all business
- Prologue: Twitter for WordPress for Groups
- Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?
- Prologue/WordPress–Private Twitter II
Still I didn’t get it, until I really started to use it. Now, after using it these last couple of months did, I couldn’t live without our private Prologue for sharing with the Automattic team and even more important keeping up with what they are working on and ideas they are playing with.2 As MT describes it:
Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.
Every team or group needs a prologue to share tidbits of what you are working on, without the pressure. Is there a similar tool you use?
This is why I’m now turning to Twitter and family to see what use I can make of them.
- I just disabled this feature, because the emails are getting annoying. [↩]
- I also get a lot of value out of the WordPress core developers prologue. [↩]
9 Comments
You just got another follower
We at Maestrosdelweb.com have used Pownce for our private group, taking advange of Pownce’s sets; but something we miss from Prologue/Wordpress are tags and search.
We at NetDownloads.com.br have used Pownce for our private group too.
I am usually a late adopter of all social networking technology myself. I just recently got facebook and I’m hearing good things about pownce from my friends.
I too have looked at the prologue theme, it’s a great idea! I just wish it was able to handle larger groups.. they suggest it is best for groups of less than 20 people I think, which is very useful for many groups, I would like to see little communities of these pop up to share info about building projects, which often have more than 20 people involved.
Interesting Jim, I haven’t considered how it would scale to larger groups of participants. What challenges have you identified? And solutions? Thanks for the insights.
Recently been introduced to Pownce for our private team networking and have seen good results.
I keep a hermit like profile on Twitter and I get also get a lot of emails letting me know about new followers. What\\\’s up with that? Is it some new form of spam?
Lloyd,
You just commented on my Flickr, and I was about to add you to my Twitter (e.g. follow you on Twitter) and then I figured “he doesn’t know me even though I live just across, in Vancouver”… and then I thought “oh well, he knows my blog uses WordPress and that I know some of the Vancouver bloggers… so whatever”
So if you see a notice that I’m following you, now you know why
Cheers,
Raul