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. 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.

My brother mentioned to me a few weeks ago seeing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes. This interview by Lesley Stahl with Mark didn’t disappoint.

The interview can be found in Kara Swisher article “Facebook: The Entire ‘60 Minutes’ Segment” Unlike Kara, I didn’t expect a “big wet kiss”, but Kara always compliments her excellent journalism with cynical editorial — for some reason I really enjoy it.

Kara also complains about no mention of MySpace, but I wonder how much rivalry there really is for 60 Minutes’ audience. I know very few people personally that are active on MySpace — and those that are, are almost all are in bands.

I also disagree that “it hits all the high (and low) points of the Facebook saga”. It’s hits make for a balanced 15 minute piece. It misses the headlines in the news about children’s safety on Facebook and the Beacon fiasco being near deja vu of the News Feed and Mini-Feed fiasco a year before.

It also likely ends with a negative feeling for Mark and the Facebook team. Possibly, by reordering and going into more detail on the highs, people might appreciate what a phenomenon Facebook is — but maybe it isn’t necessary as people already know it is, because they are using it each week.

Likely not (yet) interesting to the 60 Minutes audience is Facebook’s contributions to open source. My former Flock co-worker Ari Steinberg build and announced the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox

All my circles of friend and acquaintances at least known of Facebook, and many use it regularly. I greatly admire the Facebook experience and Mark and teams ability to solve problems others either haven’t tried or have failed at.

Friday, Feb 1st Update: Kara Swisher yeterday reported Chatty Zuckerberg Tells All About Facebook Finances which includes:

Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 to $350 million.

More interesting was the news that Facebook would spend $200 million next year on capital expenditures, which is a whole lot of servers.

By the way, more expenses, noted chatty Mark, those employee levels would rise to more than 1,000 in 2008 from 450 now.

Danny Sullivan, Dave Mcclure, and others comment that it doesn’t sound like an inviting situation for potential employees hoping to make their fortunes. But Baher Al Hakim suggests this is a “a more-realistic financial outlook” and that there is opportunity to exceed these, because to date they have been so unsuccessful in getting money off their customers.

Scoble broke the law by sharing our personal data with Plaxo.

Was that really so hard?

Now, I don’t know if that accusation true, but that I think is the accusation they are trying to make. If Dennis and Thomas do want to argue that then it should be a foundation of legal precedence — how plain Dennis finds the English isn’t how any of the legal work as far as I’m aware, nor does it respect the complexity of electronic data storage.

Still, I don’t find that is interesting as to whether Scoble broke our trust, which I hoped to challenge in my original article . It seems far fewer would argue that he had broke our trust if he had used a tool that didn’t provide the data to another service, in this case Plaxo.

In the process, I’ve demonstrated why a conversational approach isn’t appropriate for an accusation of legality

For the people that suggest that Facebook‘s Terms of Service describe either the legal or social contract, get your heads out of the sand! Terms of Services are clubs wielded by poor designs or when polite requests fail. The experience of your service is your tool for describing the contract.

I’m really excited to see what comes from the work of the wonderful people participating in DataPortability — the group includes a lot of people I greatly admire: Robert Scoble, Brad Fitzpatrick, Scott Kveton, Marc Canter, Dries Buytaert, Kristopher Tate, Blaine Cook, Chris Messina, and so many other appropriately experienced people considering these challenges.

Robert Scoble titled a recent article “Scoble is an EU lawbreaker, blogger says“, the accusation the title speaks to his because Robert used a tool to record information that his contacts had shared with him.

Dennis Howlett claims “under EU law, it’s also illegal” based on Thomas Otter “[nailing] it” — if nailing means taking the back roads and maybe not even arriving at your destination. Neither make a a clear argument, legal or otherwise, of what Robert did wrong.

What other reason is there for me to share my email address with Robert in Facebook than the hope that he will record it in his address book and email me. Robert, you missed my 30th birthday in December!