Loading ...I recently updated my site with a Newfeed. It’s never going to draw the traffic of a top YouTube hit, but it’s an interesting addition, nonetheless. My favourite part is the Twitter updates, and since I’ve started using Twitter regularly, I’ve been thinking about new ways of working shorter content (a.k.a tweets) into the traditional blog format. Blogging is actually a completely unnatural thing to get into. Twitter, on the other hand, is incredibly easy to get in to, for many obvious reasons. It’s far, far more convenient, and that’s why I think it’s going to be so influential for online publishing. Matt Mullenweg, and the guys at Automattic seem to think so too, which is why they’ve released the Prologue theme for their super blogging platform.
This morning, I finally let myself checkout the Prologue theme from the Subversion repository with the intention of quickly evaluating whether or not I can use it as a solution for another idea. And, for once, I managed to make a quick evaluation of a new technology (I can easily lose myself for hours trying out new stuff). But that’s not to say Prologue isn’t interesting; it was just so hyped up by the press fanfare, that I was expecting a little more (I was also hoping it would be a perfect fit for that idea, which probably didn’t help when I realised it didn’t do exactly what I wanted it to do). At first, I even assumed it was a real Web service on it’s own domain name….
To quickly sum up my thoughts for you; it’s a great piece of code, but it isn’t going to replace Twitter anytime soon, despite what some may have insinuated. It feels like a blog theme which encourages you to make shorter blog posts and gives you a convenient place to post them from (the Automattic team saw fit to include a post form on the index page). In fact, I bet that’s exactly what the guys at Automattic set out to achieve. It’s really nothing like a competitor to Twitter, but I’m pretty sure Matt and the guys weren’t looking to trounce all over Evan and the team at the top micro-blogging service (not yet, anyway).
My main suggestion is that the guys at Automattic should start thinking of ways to separate content, or automatically classify it, based on the length and expected response from recipients/readers. The Prologue theme simply treats the ’status updates’ as posts, which is fine if you’re happy to work with tags and categories to separate things out (tags are just too cumbersome for status updates). I think there’s room for a system which carefully routes a user through a path of creating an article, or creating a status update. There’s definitely a difference between the two, and user interfaces should be built with consideration for this. I’m certain that status updates are a huge growth area for social networking technologies, and mixing them in with more considered chunks of hypertext, could be interesting.
