37 Signals Backpack tool, which creates an intranet for companies, has announced a couple of upcoming features in the past few days that are meant to overall improve the service. Multi-user support is one of the features that will soon be a part of the Backpack system, and to that end, there will also be a Newsroom.
The new feature is meant to offer a feature for users to be alerted to activities that have taken place since you last checked in. It is, in effect, a Twitter-like updating, status system that brings in the bulletin-board/announcement necessity of a tool that facilitates communication amongst groups of people working around a similar goal.
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Yes, we can talk about how the inclusion of this particular feature solidifies the economy of Twitter and the effectiveness of its simple system, but the more relative aspect of the upcoming Newsroom feature is the possibility that its introduction may in fact be in response to Wordpress' Prologue, along with all the other collaboration sites out there that have also found the updating system to be handy for keeping multiple members of a single group notified of occurrences, in an exportable, easily accessible fashion.
As Wordpress' parent company Automattic raised funding and quickly released Prologue for group blogging communities that use the Wordpress backend, it was made quite clear that Prologue could be used for a variety of purposes within an intranet system. As VentureBeat noted some time ago, the Prologue feature fits well for a group environment that 37 Signals' Basecamp and Backpack provide.