Nice post from Sitepoint on a new microblogging service for WordPress. Looks like I’m gong to have to give it a try:

Last month saw the announcement of P2, a special theme for use with WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress installations that makes a regular blog look and act more like a microblog. It’s an upgrade of the Prologue theme that was released early last year, and if you’re comfortable with WordPress you’ll certainly find this is easy to understand.

For those of you who are running your own WordPress installation, adding P2 is as simple as activating a theme: just upload the P2 files to the appropriate spot on your web server, and activate it in the WordPress administration panel. At the time of writing, the P2 theme is only available from the Automattic Subversion repository, but it should appear on the Theme Directory any day now. If you’re feeling adventurous, grab it with SVN:

svn checkout http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/p2/

Otherwise, you can try P2 on a free WordPress.com blog right away.

P2 features a number of Ajax enhancements that make browsing and posting extremely fast. Keyboard shortcuts are available that make navigating your P2 microblog as fast as typing; posts and comments can be added and edited without a page refresh; and there’s even a heads-up notification area that lets you know immediately if fresh content has appeared since you first opened the page. If you’re looking for Twitter-like features such as marking an item as a favorite or the ability to befriend other users, these are unavailable by default, but WordPress’s wide variety of plugins can help you add those features. New users are able to become blog authors right away, so if your aim is to create a new free-for-all microblog, you’ll be able to achieve that with P2.

WordPress’ installation requirements are quite straightforward and should be available on most web hosts: you’ll just need PHP and MySQL. Both WordPress and P2 are free.