As if I needed another reason to love WordPress, along comes their new Prologue theme which effectively gives you your own local version of Twitter. That's not to say it's a competitor to Twitter: the whole beauty of Twitter is that everyone is using the same platform (with occasionally unfortunate consequences). But as a team collaboration tool, particularly on anything requiring a bit more privacy, this is potentially brilliant.
And yet, it's so obvious. The 'tweets' are just very short blog posts. Author archiving, tagging, commenting, permalinking and RSS functionality is all built-in anyway. All it needed was the integration of a 'write new post' box into the display template - plus the stroke of genius to actually do it. Now all we need is an events calendar (maybe using the same 'input box on the output screen' concept), and WordPress takes over the world.
(If you want to use it on a local installation, you can get the files from Subversion. And you know what? Looking at the underlying PHP code, it's depressingly straightforward. 
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29 January 2008
As I mentioned on Twitter itself, I'm already working on something using this to create a 'safe' platform for certain folk to share info and yell for help, without feeling they are going to be engaging in a vast, scary twitterverse. Will keep you posted