Small Business, Prologue and Twitter

The guys at WordPress-based development company Automattic, have recently launched Prologue.  It’s a template that turns a self-hosted version of my favourite blogging platform into a Twitter-like attention stream.
But why would …

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4th February 2008 at 11:29 am

The guys at WordPress-based development company Automattic, have recently launched Prologue.  It’s a template that turns a self-hosted version of my favourite blogging platform into a Twitter-like attention stream.

But why would any small business benefit from this type of continuous partial attention tool? And what does Prologue offer over Twitter or even status updates on Facebook?

prologue

Let’s think about the attention stuff first. This is a fascinating subject, but to dramatically over-simplify, continuous partial attention is everything we notice and keep up-to-date with out of the corner of our eye.  Technology is increasingly providing us with extended peripheral vision.  Twitter and Prologue do this by allowing us to post short messages (140 characters or less) about what we’re up to.

The advantage of these personal, concise news feeds?  Well, it’s like information ESP.  At their best, in a startup or small business context, these tools could help you keep up-to-speed with what colleagues are doing and how projects are evolving without even really noticing.  This type of personal communication also has the advantage of making you feel more connected with colleagues even if you work virtually or from home offices. 

So back to Prologue vs Twitter.  Put simply Prologue can be set up around private groups so it’s more secure than Twitter, if you want your business communications to remain inside the firewall.  What it doesn’t offer is the mobile phone based SMS update element of Twitter.  Prologue also lets you group messages by topic or category – something which I don’t think Twitter can do.  Again from a business context, very useful if you want to keep up-to-date with specific projects.

I’d definitely give Prologue a look and can see it being tremendously useful for distributed or virtual workforces and for teams brought together to work on specific projects.  What’s more, like Twitter, it’s free.

A final caveat.  One person’s ‘continuous partial attention’, is another person’s ‘irritating distraction’.  We all need to evolve our information triage skills.  Some find this harder than others.  But that’s a topic for another day …

#646464

Alex is the founder and editor of SmallBizPod, the UK's first podcast dedicated to small business, start-ups and entrepreneurship. Alex writes about topical small business issues, entrepreneurs and anything else that catches his eye here on the small business blog. http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk

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