prologue Matt Mullenweg has announced over on the WordPress.com blog that Automattic, the company behind WP.com, Akismet and the driving force behind WordPress development, have created a new theme for WordPress. Whoopie-do, you might be thinking. But this theme is more than just a look and feel for your WordPress blog. This theme clones Twitter. To quote the post:

Basically how it works is 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.

Below the posting box is a list of everyone’s latest tweet or message, with their Gravatar next to it. You can click on an author to see all their messages, or a tag to see all of the messages in a given tag (which we use for projects). There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader.

How incredibly excellent. I’ve been after a clone of Twitter for a while, and to be able to combine it with my beloved WordPress is just awesome. I’m already putting something together to make use of this!