DISQUS

Chris Brogan: Prologue is More Than We Are Considering

  • Vijayendra Mohanty · 3 weeks ago
    Don't know about the team microblogging functionality, but I fell for Prologue's slim, real-time looks. I have hammered it into working as a single user blog theme. Wanted to give my blog a more realtime newsy look as opposed to its previous article collection look. The tag list on the sidebar works as a fine map of what all I have been into lately.
  • Mihir · 2 weeks ago
    @vimoh its super ...
    just tht in IE, sidebar div goes down ..
    but thts problem wid prologue og.
  • rafiq · 1 year ago
    Fully agree with you @chrisbrogan
  • Annie Boccio · 1 year ago
    This theme is genius! When I read Matt M's post I immediately activated it to check it out, and already have a couple ideas of how small groups I'm involved with could use it.

    The difficulty in posting from the road is an issue I'm sure someone will solve soon- you can still read it via RSS of course. But the impressive thing about Prologue is how it got people to look at multi-user blogs in a new way. Genius :).
  • Rob Bazinet · 1 year ago
    Agreed. The real beauty is this is just a theme but it opens up so much more.

    I sounds like it was something they decided to whip up, so was the win just by accident or was there more planning involved.
  • David Petherick · 1 year ago
    I think there is a lot more to prologue

    I'm looking at using a plugin that automatically serves up legible content with a different iPhone-optimised theme.

    I'm also thinking about its use at meetups and conferences where the delegates can share swap and network, and then the results can be opened up to outside world, or it can include people who can't physically be there, or for interview Q&A sessions.

    As you say, it's just a theme - but, like twitter it's brilliantly simple - and very mashable / flexible / extendible.
  • timbury · 1 year ago
    I haven't played with it yet (never enough time!), but I'm wondering: There are already plugins for wordpress to use Twitter from WP. Now, Prologue tweets inside the wall. Isn't this just the classic intra/internet setup? Couldn't the two be tied together and internal and external communications be determined by user rights, system policies, etc.? Twitlogue? Pritter?

    I think this could be very useful in many areas, I only wish I had the time to play with this stuff. ;-)
  • Edward Kustoff · 1 year ago
    Coming from a corporate world, I would have loved to have that available. Its a great concept, like David P. said, based on its brilliant simplicity.
  • Christian Burns · 1 year ago
    I am in the process of setting up an enterprise type twitter style private group blog at work. I have the blessing of the CEO, now we are going to try and piece it together and how it would help every employee in the company. It will be a private wordpress blog using the new prologue

    Going to either have everyone (all 14 employees) get wordpress logins and join and try and use feed demon for reading the private RSS feed. Used mostly for status updates and whats going on in departments, who is out on a service call. Things that we use email for way too much. I am very excited about it.

    One thing is that you can post to a blog using jott.com so there is your quick non sms update.
  • David Petherick · 1 year ago
    UPDATE: I've set up Prologue theme on a blog at http://also.cc

    Do register to try it out for yourself, and add to the debate.

    Actually, it's a pretty good domain name for testing out the concept of group contact without email CC - "Hey, make sure you also CC David on that one..." ;-)

    @Tim - took me les than 6 minutes to download, install the theme and customise! Get with the program! 352 seconds!

    @Christian - Why not try OpenID logins?
  • John Ratcliffe-Lee · 1 year ago
    Part of me thinks Prologue is great but another part of me, especially after reading this post, thinks that Campfire is a much more idea solution.

    Especially for a corporate environment, Campfire might present a lower threshold of learning for a greater number of people and it's tied in well with all the other project management aspects of Basecamp.

    Finally, 37s just released a slick iPhone interface for it.
  • Corvida · 1 year ago
    Great perspective on Prologue! I think it would greatly benefit some of the startups and blog communities that use Twitter.
  • Keren Dagan · 1 year ago
    yep, I see a use for it. Those snowy day where everybody works from home. I can live without the mobile option. IM would be nice.

    Keren
  • Matthew Reinbold · 1 year ago
    The problem that Prologue is solving - a password protected twitter 'behind the firewall' for a distinct group of contributors - wouldn't even be an issue if Twitter supported groups (similar to Pownce). The reason Twitter isn't ideal is because when you write your 140 characters its broadcast to everyone - your drinking buddies, your uncomfortable and aggressive acquaintances, your rec league, etc. If Twitter had groups you could create the dedicated 'coworker' channel and only send work related stuff for that and 'viola!' you'd be serving the exact purpose that this custom wordpress theme is trying to solve (only with SMS and IM support).
  • DavidTan · 1 year ago
    I'm still wondering what all this buzz is about... But it sure looks cool and thus will give it a try :)
  • John @ The WordPress Expert · 1 year ago
    If you're looking to replicate Twitter's cellphone functionality in a hack-ish sort of way, try these quick tips:

    - Publish posts from your cellphone using WordPress's email-to-post feature (assuming it could be used by multiple authors; not sure on that one)

    - Receive posts on your cellphone using an RSS-to-SMS service (such as Pingie.com)
  • Dhruva Sagar · 1 year ago
    I believe almost all decent organizations use some or the other IM client within their organizations. Even if they don't communicating between people can be very simple even through DOS commands!
    Every company has mailing facility within the organization and I would believe that is till now the preferred medium of communication.

    This does offer several other possibilities and one can explore those, but I somehow do not think it can replace the things that are already being used.

    Having said that, this is still a very nice thing, innovative and interesting.
  • Tyler · 1 year ago
    I have modified Prologue and now use it as my Twitter client to tag my own Tweets. I will release a version once I have cleaned up the code a bit more.
  • Foxinni - Wordpress Designer · 1 year ago
    I'm gonna see what this thing looks like a bit later. Maybe bring out my own version. Can't W8.
  • Shanti Braford · 1 year ago
    Can Pownce be used for something like this?

    Setting up a WP blog "behind a firewall" does not sound like the easiest solution.

    I've wanted a similar suite of apps for small teams for a while now, i.e.:
    * broadcast/share Twitter-style updates with your team
    * share pertinent links via a private delicious-style feed

    I guess basically a Basecamp Lite.
  • Travell Perkins · 1 year ago
    Looks like the twitter guys should crack open a book on enterprise pub sub. If not for the social stickiness a Twitter implementation based on a federation of ActiveMQ servers would work wonders. Prologue is just a list, a multi user blog. The short comings would become apparent soon enough. Email lists do the job really well, but the UI is god awful. I like prologue, but it is what it is; blogging isn't messaging. I think what Prologue shows is that there is still a ton of opportunity to take the Twitter model to new places with new tools. It all starts with a reliable messaging solution and then go from there.
  • Pete Au · 1 year ago
    At first I felt really sceptical about this tool. But now, I see it's potential. It could be useful and could actually save up some time. But it would be important to make all your team memers use it, otherwise it will be useless. Anyway, all by itself it's just a nice add-inn, that I would probably like to see in my collaboration tool - Wrike (http://www.wrike.com)
  • walesmd · 1 year ago
    This theme has set of a flurry of ideas in my head. Earlier this week I put together a team consisting of Elliot Haughin, Dylan Wreggelsworth, and myself to take the concepts from Prologue and make it possible to turn any Wordpress blog into a "node" within a distributed messaging system.

    It is our hope that your blog will soon become your preferred method of communication - from global shouts to the entire world to private messages to other users, no matter what domain they are on.

    Of course, blogs that utilize a Prologue-functional theme will have a few extra features (as their blog is merely a messaging center) and we'll be releasing quite a few Prologue-functional themes our selves. We'd really like to promote Wordpress as a messaging system, since more people following that line of thinking would bring more people into our service.

    We'll be burning the midnight oil this weekend in hopes to have a very basic level of functionality complete this weekend.
  • Worcester Web Design · 1 year ago
    I'm really surprised this hasn't been done before; I can see many variations of this concept on Wordpress coming in the near future. It really is a great idea :)
  • bentrem · 1 year ago
    I jumped right on this with http://42words.wordpress.com
    In comments to a couple of blog posts I pointed out a couple of (painfully obvious) shortcomings, i.e. pages seemed to have been disabled, and categories were totally frabbed.

    Lo! and Behold! Those got fixed post haste and at the same time the functional logic was shot right behind the ear i.e. the whole freakin' idea was to show "only most recent from each contributer".
    Because (Wooo, lots of people have total control?) some people didn't get it, this was dropped.

    So now Prologue is /nothing but/ a theme.

    You wrote "Nothing under the hood is much different than blogging." That was not initially true. It was a different functionality.
    People didn't get it?
    Well fine, people didn't get Twitter ... should we shoot Twitter behind the ear?

    I'm very disappointed to see how this turned out.

    NB: because it went stright from broken to fixed but de-twittered, we didn't get a chance to grab an interim version, one that had the twitterized functionality c/w pages and working categories.

    --bentrem

    p.s. boy, there's a really wierd discussion dynamic ... some folk have huge say while others don't even get their comments moderated. this just so you know what I'm talking about when I tweet about "A-list dynamics" and personality politics.

    "Don't be lucid and ironic; people will turn it against you saying, ''Ah, you see? He isn't a nice perso.''" --Albert Camus
  • david · 1 year ago
    using the plug-ins registered-only in conjunction with subscribe2 to create an e-mail digest driven private communication system. works pretty well.
  • Vince · 1 year ago
    I like it, but find it restrictive for my pourposes.
    Would be very good for me if it could:
    a) handle more than 15 team members (maybe an ability to set max users to display - based on latest post?)

    b) More importantly, more than one group?

    I suppose what I’m really after is a way to have a fully fledged chat type plugin, with multiple rooms or channels?

    That would be fantastic for making WP a ‘Social’ platform, especially with WP-MU.

    In the meantime for those unaware; you can use this theme in conjuction with TwitterTools by Alex King.
    That will solve being able to update whilst 'on-the-road'.

    I tried it and works great: two-way posting, either from Twitter or WP.

    - Vince
  • DoeNietZoMoeilijk · 1 year ago
    One very important advantage Prologue has over Twitter, apart from the inside-the-firewall stuff, is the simple fact that it's less likely to be down half the time. It can be set up as an in-house app, which means you're not depending on third parties.

    That alone makes it worthwile in an environment where Twitter clearly isn't (yet).
  • joec0914 · 1 year ago
    Chris, I've been doing some writing about Distributed Twitter and would love to hear your take on it. This post of yours on Prologue is closely related. http://tinyurl.com/6j7x79
  • greedsl · 11 months ago
    i came here from google's search on prologue and i thank you for the info!

    the only thing that discouraging me from using wordpress and prologue on a twitter like site, is the slow proccess i noticed on extending it but if i'll find anything usefull, i will return to you!
  • NITS · 4 months ago
    Its a good thing to do, i will surely wanna to try this.