Introducing Prologue
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.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter ended 2007 under an unusual amount of scrutiny for a service its size: Dave Winer asked back in March how basic it really was (how basic is Twitter?), Mathew Ingram closed the year asking what people actually do when they tweet (what we're doing when we Twitter), and January brought a Macworld-week outage plus a running Techmeme debate over whether rapid growth had outrun any business model.
Against that backdrop, Automattic's move reads less like imitation than triangulation. The company says outright that Twitter whetted its appetite for something more — internal updates and private group messages — which lands squarely on the weakness flagged in mid-December, when many-to-many messaging was called out as a corporate information-protection risk. Prologue keeps the format and drops the public timeline, and the pickup across TechCrunch, Mashable, CenterNetworks and Ingram's own blog suggests the 'clone or complement' question hit a nerve.
First-order effects
- Automattic gets the internal status channel it wanted, built on WordPress.com rather than Twitter.com — no dependence on a service that had just gone down during Steve Jobs' keynote.
- WordPress.com users gain a way to run private, group-oriented short-message streams, a use case Twitter's public-facing product did not address as of January 2008.
Second-order effects
- Prologue positions Automattic to capture the private-group slice of the microblogging demand Twitter created — organizations that liked the format but feared the leak exposure flagged in December now have a self-hosted option on familiar software.
- With Twitter simultaneously committing to a dedicated Japanese version via Digital Garage, the format is being contested on two fronts at once: geographic expansion by Twitter itself, and format replication by the largest blog-hosting platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, short-form messaging stops being a standalone product category and becomes a feature layer that established publishing platforms absorb — shifting the durable value from owning the public timeline to controlling private group streams.
- The corporate/internal communications market would split off from consumer microblogging, with hosting providers like Automattic structurally placed to serve both from one stack.
The trend: Microblogging is bifurcating in early 2008 between Twitter's public timeline and a private-group variant being folded into existing publishing platforms.