Blog Tipz

WordPress and Automattic have teamed up to create a WordPress-based Twitter theme, which was designed for groups of 3-15 people to post little snippets about what they are up to. Integrating the Twitter experience into WordPress is a relatively new concept, making blogging a more instantaneous or chat-like experience using shorter “posts”. While this announcement may be seen as a complete reworking of the Twitter, in my opinion it is just enhancing the user’s experience,providing more flexibility and availablility to previous and new Twitter users.

The interface was designed for people wanting to stay more updated, but without the long Twitter down times. The theme works by allowing users you specify the ability to post messages at the top of the page in a message box. A Gravatar is displayed next to each author’s latest message, and a link (their name) which redirects you to their full page of messages. From there, it works very similar to traditional WordPress, with the ability to comment, track, browse messages by tags, and subscribe in numerous areas such as the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and searches. 

In terms of customization, custom headers can be added to customize it for your group. Privacy-wise, options are still available such as making the blog public, public but invisible to search engines, and password protected.

The theme is available as open source under the GPL. View a demonstration/preview of the Prologue theme here.

With this announcement, more WordPress and Twitter fans will be able to accomplish much more widespread tasks, such as micro-blogging and connecting in private/collaboration groups more effectively.

[via Matt Mullenweg's WordPress.com blog]