So... it's an ajax-y forum?

Don't get me wrong, I really like what they've done, but it isn't mind blowing. The design and user experience are stellar. It's amazing how the guys at Automattic can take an old concept, pare it down the the minimum viable product, and polish the hell out of the experience.

Yeah, and Twitter is just a database of content items with a 140 character max, right?

My point is, user experience does matter...and as Matt's post indicates, they've actually solved (or attempted to solve) some pretty big UI obstacles with this theme.

Combine that with the fact that I could probably have this up and running in 5 minutes or so and I think they've definitely accomplished something pretty cool here.

I'd expect this to suffer from extreme 'youtube effect' - having complete idiots post at each other at high velocity and hurting the spirit of your site. Any reasons why it wouldn't?

One would hope that, if you're using it for internal business purposes, you'd have insufficient critical mass of idiocy to sustain the reaction.

This is my favorite comment here, ever. :)

I think this is a hugely exciting development and can see numerous ways our startup can use this internally.

Our team is spread between San Francisco, Cape Town and Rio De Janeiro and the real time nature of this makes for an excellent internal dashboard/forum/news/tweet/status mash-up. Matt talks about how it's changed the way they communicate internally and I see this as the biggest win here.

We had started to do some of the above with Campfire, but Wordpress+P2 looks so much more powerful. Imagine tweets, exception reports, business alerts, notes and more, all showing up in one place, tagged, discussable and in real time.

So it's like Friendfeed?

Yes, but locally hosted, configurable (you have the source, Luke) and optionally private for your team.

I need to redo my personal site, and this video convinced me to use P2.

Love it!

Can we add this as a subset of an existing blog? So the readers can meet and talk on the P2 subsection while the main blog content still exists.

You could do that pretty easily by rolling some custom templates, yes.

Is TED.com using P2 ?

Nope.