Introducing TWITTORIES.COM
Exactly 90 minutes ago I had an 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.
After I put the kids to bed, I quickly googled to see if anyone had already done something similar and couldn’t see anything (although even if it isn’t 100% original I don’t care, it’ll still be fun), registered the domain name TWITTORIES.com (a twittory is a twitter story), threw together a wiki using wikispaces, and exactly 90 minutes later I am launching it to the world.
The basic idea is that each twittory will last for 140 entries and each entry can be a maximum of 140 characters. Twittory #1, which I have already entitled “The Darkness Inside”, will commence as soon as we have 140 people signed up here and will conclude, no matter where the story is up to, when we have the full 140 entries. 140 x 140 is… a story with a maximum of 19600 characters.
I always knew Marshall McLuhan was onto something…
December 6th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Dude, you mistyped the URL in the link.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:17 am
You could then have themed ones later on. Not just genres but states of mind, days of the week and input method e.g. “drunk”, “via mobile”, “only when you’re angry”, “can only input on monday mornings” another one for friday afternoons, etc. It would be good to see how dark, dirty or funny the stories get for different days of the week, etc.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
I’d spell twittories with two t’s.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Good thinking Yoko.
December 7th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
[...] has taken a different angle on utilizing Twitter and created Twitories. Check out Cameron’s post about it here. I found it through one of his [...]
December 12th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
[...] Darkness Inside“. Twittories are the brain-child of Cameron Reilly who wrote about the inspiration for twittories at his blog G’Day World. (In reality, each contribution is probably kept to 128 characters or [...]
December 13th, 2007 at 2:49 am
Count me in
December 13th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
[...] you are not already familiar (or bored or incensed) with twittories check out this, this and [...]
January 8th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
[...] On December 6 2007, I had this crazy idea about collaborating with people on Twitter to write short stories. I called it TWITTORIES. I invited 140 people to sign up to write 140 characters each of the story. Our first attempt, a story called “The Darkness Inside“, made it to about 99 entries before it ran out of steam. The main issue back then, I think, was that many people who signed up for twittories just didn’t check their twitter messages very often. So when they were alerted that it was their turn to write, they just didn’t show up. And it stalled. I got busy with personal stuff, TPN, etc, and this was a spider project and not a starfish. [...]
January 9th, 2009 at 12:30 am
[...] On December 6 2007, I had this crazy idea about collaborating with people on Twitter to write short stories. I called it TWITTORIES. I invited 140 people to sign up to write 140 characters each of the story. Our first attempt, a story called “The Darkness Inside“, made it to about 99 entries before it ran out of steam. The main issue back then, I think, was that many people who signed up for twittories just didn’t check their twitter messages very often. So when they were alerted that it was their turn to write, they just didn’t show up. And it stalled. I got busy with personal stuff, TPN, etc, and this was a spider project and not a starfish. [...]