9 March 2008
Prologue, WordPress, Twitter and the search for Creativity
Posted by Opinioneer under: On Wordpress .
I think it is not a secret that I am a big fan of WordPress and that I believe that it has more potential than most people can imagine. Turning WordPress into a Twitter like app is not that hard.
And many posts (see REv2, BloggingPro, VentureBeat, BlogHerald, Mashable and several hundred more) have been written about how Prologue looks similar to Twitter.
Of course Matt wrote in his Prologue introduction that even though they were inspired by Twitter to make this theme, they are not interested in developing a Twitter-like tool. He further points out how they use Prologue in a similar manner others use Basecamp.
That’s the obvious stuff. Here goes the conspiracy theorist:
What prompted this sudden release of a theme such as Prologue by Automattic?
a) We can look no further and take Matt’s post face value: they were using the tool internally and thought; “why not release it”.
b) They (Automattic) were standing by, watching Twitter grow like crazy, scratching their heads and thinking; “there is nothing special about Twitter that WordPress can’t do with a little tweaking”. So they built Prologue.
c) Twitter is establishing itself as the tool for microblogging and they figured they can capture some of that market and also benefit from the Twitter buzz.
The answer could be any of the above, or it could be any of numerous other possible scenarios. The truth is that I am not a conspiracy theorist so I have a different answer.
Matt and the gang are probably frustrated that almost nobody is coming out with any creative uses of WordPress, beyond the blog. They are probably wondering why people don’t see the capabilities that the WordPress platform has. So they decided to hit the nail in the head.
What better way to showcase the thinking-outside-the-box apps that can be built on the WP platform, than by laying down the foundation to build an application similar to Twitter, one of the most popular applications out there today.
This was just a thought I’ve had, but the mention of Basecamp in Matt’s post I think supports, intentionally or unintentionally, my thoughts.
Does the WordPress community lack innovators?
