Prologue versus Twitter
Wordpress launched Prologue today, in a move that many technophiles and bloggers have immediately heralded as the death of Twitter. Personally, I think the hype has gotten the better of far too many people.
Twitter and Prologue are both very solid applications that offer a tremendous amount of value to users, however they serve distinctly different purposes and have few real similarities. As a result, Prologue is likely to appeal to a completely different user niche than Twitter, and won’t pose any major threat to its market share.
Before I go any further though, a background is warranted. Prologue is a new Wordpress theme that can be applied to their traditional blogs. As Wordpress explains:
“…when someone has the ability to post to a blog they see a short form at the top of the home page with a post box and tags. There they can post short messages about what they’re doing.”
The end result, such as the one I’ve created here, is a collaborative blog designed to house the rapid-fire posts and resulting discussions of a select group of people. There can be as many or as few editors as desired, and posts can be either restricted to the group or publicly available to the entire web.
As with normal blog posts, Prologue posts can be tagged with key identifiers. Tags are then allocated a unique URL, where all posts tagged with the same term will appear. Importantly, tags are also allocated a unique RSS feed, thus enabling readers to narrow their feed subscriptions to a specific topic or thread.
Now to compare and contrast. First with the similarities.
Like Twitter, Prologue is designed to house short, fast, raw posts covering thoughts, announcements, resources, brainstorming sessions, dialogue, or just about anything else that gets fired off the top of the head.
In keeping with the standard blogging convention, posts appear in chronological order, with the most recent content appearing at the top and the oldest content situated at the bottom.
That’s really all there is in terms of similarities. Now for the differences, and there are quite a few of those.
First and foremost, Prologue is designed as a group space. Twitter is unabashedly individualistic. Group collaboration does take place in the Twitterverse, but posts are ultimately divided into user-created and non-user-created categories and therefore appear on different pages under different users. As a result it’s far more difficult to track a discussion in Twitter than it is in Prologue.
With Prologue, user discussions can develop through use of the commenting tool and are consequently tied to the original post, which results in far more continuity and easy-reading.
Secondly, Twitter is designed to be mobile. Prologue is not. Twitter users have the ability to connect with one another via instant messaging clients, SMS, RSS, web interface, direct messages sent to their email addresses, and via countless user-created add-ons and third party applications. Prologue is restricted to the blog and RSS feeds exclusively.
Third and perhaps most significantly, Twitter carries with it - and has evolved into - an absolutely massive and passionate user community, many of whom actively interact with one another in real time - like a chat room. The speed of interaction is only possible through Twitter’s various connectivity options mentioned above.
Prologue’s purpose is inherently different than this, as was summed up in its unveiling on the Wordpress.com blog:
“We’re fans of Twitter around here, in fact many Automatticians have accounts, but while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more, like a way for each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks”
Prologue is designed with the needs of small to medium sized groups in mind. It stands no chance of keeping up with the speed of background banter you see in Twitter, but ultimately it doesn’t need to. Twitter serves that purpose just fine.
That said, Twitter is no match for Prologue’s organisational structure, where entire conversations are neatly packed into a single post and corresponding comments, and tag-specific RSS feeds and URLs further facilitate the location of previous discussions.
Twitter favours immediate anarchic communication; Prologue, the long term storing and call-back of targeted information - and it’s hardly the harbinger of Twitter’s demise.
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008