Last week we ran a story on figures out of Japan where half of the top ten selling works of fiction are written on mobile phones; people (not surprisingly) thought this was rather odd, but sales figures don’t lie. A new project founded by The Podcast Network CEO Cameron Reilly, Twittories, is aiming to see whether Twitter can be use to create fiction.
To quote Cameron on the idea:
My wife and I were putting our kids to bed and we were doing something we have done with them since they were about two years of age. One of us starts a new story by telling a few lines and then the next person picks up where they left off and so on. I thought “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation” and started to wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of folks on twitter collaborate on a short story - 140 characters at a time.
The idea is that each Twittory will last for 140 entries and each entry can be a maximum of 140 characters. Twittory #1 “The Darkness Inside”, commenced yesterday with 140 participants starting to contribute 140 characters each, with the end goal being a 19600 character short story. The story as it evolves can be read here.
Cameron doesn’t think that this is an evolutionary step forward in the development of fiction, but an interesting experiment in mashing crowd based contributions via Twitter. If you can become a best selling author by writing something on a mobile phone, maybe this idea may evolve into something with a future.
Great and it’s my turn - pressure just increased!
I’m keen to see how it turns out. All it takes is one person to shoot off on a tangent to throw a new spin on the whole story. @Bronwen Good luck!
Still got a way to go to my entry…. can’t plan for it dammit.
It’s very compelling. I find myself impatiently awaiting each person’s contribution. Very interested to see the final version!
Cameron Reilly is my fav person in the whole…. of ThePodcastNetwork
name is tongue twisting and hand twisting.. get a shorter name.. like., ttories or ttories.com.. fine to market it as twittories, but make it easier for your followers
Finding myself obsessively checking for the next installment - and pondering where it will be when my turn arrives - great concept.
this is the first time i’ve seen twitter used to collaborate on a story
but, it’s hardly the first piece of fiction produced on there
my buddy JunkDNA is onto his second twitter’ed novel!
see http://twitter.com/junkdnafiction
The final version will be very interesting, a bit like chinese whisper based fiction. Like David I am a long way down the list so very hard to plan my 140 characters.
“Her history with Julian spanned years, to their time in Majorca, through Europe and Asia, then to here at the gates of hell”
Wait a sec, I traced that route and it ends up in Australia.
There have been a number of twittered stories created in the past by solo authors - its great to see collaborative work unfold in the twitterverse.
This kinda reminds me of the ‘three headded broadway star’ skit played in improv games…. But with less boob jokes.
This idea is great, I’m loving it and eagerly anticipating each new twittory. It is so amazing where people are taking the story.
Twitter.
I just don’t get it.
Why??
Granted, maybe the 3rd party apps are more useful/fun but I just don’t get it.
Maybe I spend too much time learning Erlang. hahaha
cbmeeks
http://codershangout.com
@Chris Saad - you obviously haven’t met ME yet…
@Chris Saad - or ME !
LOL it took three people for the story to turn to shit
“#3 - She, the Cold One, who will remain nameless due to the ongoing conflict with the overlords, stared at J with ice daggers as eyes”
AWFUL
People have been doing this kind of round robin story forever, both on and off the internet, so I guess this is interesting just because it’s Twitter? And just as I am one of those who never got the point of Twitter… I don’t get this either.
“…Wait a sec, I traced that route and it ends up in Australia.”
@Ben: haha! Clever, clever.
I find this fairly ridiculous- as a teenager I used to do this on dial up BBS sites (oooo 1990 represent). And as an English major in college, can safely say every intro to creative writing class plays this game at least once. I am guessing all of you excited about this weren’t English majors?
The fact that novels are written on cell phones isn’t a big deal- they still have to be WRITTEN regardless of the UI used.
I would say this is a fad that will fade soon- but I’ve been wrong before!
“Too many cooks will spoil the soup.” o.o
THE business-lever-operating of the web2.0 like flickr.com,facebook.com,myspace.com and also on, it’s just about time.
twitter.com like SmS,novel-level using is just first step. Using CROWD-WISDOM is the key moment for
SNSs future.
http://www.yeefe.com from shanghai,ChInA
Blog:yeefe.com/blog
I tried this a couple of months back at http://www.tweetbook.com, but I guess I didnt have the juice to get it on TC! I am excited to see the idea move forward, and in a new interesting way.
Good luck Cameron!
The comma killed the link above - it should be http://www.tweetbook.com and twitter.com/tbook . We even have a facebook group!
I hear if you rub your Twitteris enough you can totally rub out some fictional pleasure.
This was used to be done in school and its great fun. In addition you also had to remember the story and that add sentences based on your memory.
This is certainly an interesting tool to put it all together and play it like a game any chance you get. The only thing is that the quality of the text and the game usually goes down when the number of participants becomes too high. Since your input becomes negligible, it’s impact on story is reduced. So the moderators should try to limit the number of people submitting for each story. Of course there is no limit on the number of stories that may run in parallel.
Cool anyway.
Besides the fact that this was invented years ago by the surrealist group in Paris under the nice knickname of “cadavres exquis”, it also is a very nice way to ban litterature from the end result. Just figure out that with Proust for example, you wouldn’t even have reach the main verb with 140 digits.
It is SMS style logorrhea, and definitively not writing. Sorry.
We tried something similar. We created a twitter user at http://twitter.com/minilibro Everytime anyone sends an email to safpk967k4@twittermail.com (using the twittermail service), the text gets automatically published. The idea was to create a live book made of SMSs from the crowd ….
As has been pointed out, this is old. Pre-Web 2.0 old, surprising as it may be to most people here that anything existed before Facebook. It was popular as a parlor game in the Victorian era, or at least a variant where you write your part of the story on a piece of paper but fold it so only the last line or two can be seen. It’s far from new to the Internet either - virtually every Internet forum, large or small, will have at least one thread playing this game.
I won’t do the obvious thing and stick my nose in the air asking ‘why is this news’ because this is TechCrunch. You don’t buy the Daily Mail and write to the editor saying ‘Excuse me sir, but I couldn’t help noticing an undercurrent of racism in your reporting’ or ask the Financial Times to give more of a voice to the trade unions.
I do find it rather disturbing that the connection it can trigger in a blogger’s mind is “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation”. Does everything have to be framed in the context of something Web 2.0 related? We’re turning into a Star Trek episode. Any minute now an alien Captain Kirk will land on our planet and try to teach us the meaning of love, to which we will reply “Oh… so it’s like having a really good Facebook friend?”
Interesting idea, although I think I can find better things to do with my time. Besides, I’d probably just add stupid, random, off topic pieces that would have me exiled from the group :s
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
Ah, someone FINALLY discovers a use for Twitter! The Twitter Digerati, I can hardly wait. What’s that kids game where you pass a secret around the room and the last person says it out loud?
For people who think this isn’t new, or news, or fitting for Techcrunch because it is ‘just’ a funny little bit of information I have a quote for you from Isaac Asimov:
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny …’”
After reading this I thought ‘That’s funny…’. It might NOT herald a new discovery but it is a mashup of old and new and maybe, in a weird way, it will inspire the next little funny thing and they might lead to… well, you get the point.
This idea is great, I’m loving it and eagerly anticipating each new twittory. It is so amazing where people are taking the story.
This is very cool, but it only takes one jerk (probably one of the guys above who rant throwing about words like “web 2.0″ as if they invented it) to flub it for the entire group. I’m interested in seeing how this works out, and how they keep the Victorian Era Web 2.0ers at bay.
Made in DNA (aka JunkDNA Fiction @ Twitter), Twitter author of BUKKAKE BRAWL and MEDIA WHORES
Hope for them that the writers strike goes on for a while!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I’m attempting something similar, except that you simply call in your addition as a voicemail fragment. http://pageoftext.com/voicemail_how_does_it_end
Why doesn’t he just say that he read the article on Mobile novels in Japan and had the idea for Twitter, instead of coming up with fake reasons that sound better, like ‘one day me and my wife were reading for ou kids in bed…’ Gees, everyone knows you read that article just like we all did, man!