Tonight, I downloaded the Mashable app on my iphone and one of the top stories I read talked about how some "genius" (more specifically, Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed and Huffington Post fame) found a way to merge the thrill of the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) line of books with Twitter.
Like me, I'm sure many of you born (or growing up) within the era known as either the 80's or 90's are more than familiar with the lore of the CYOA books. A mystical invention, where rather than having to be drug around by the author's whim or fancy, YOU, yes YOU, are given a forked road and a decision, to take the fate of your own personal reading experience into your own hands, AND, either triumph, get lost in a cave for all eternity, die by alien hands, or a million other increasingly more unfathomable and bizarre, and thoroughly enjoyable conclusions.
And, I'm sure, like me, many of you cheated ;) marking one or more of your previous choices leading to your current path with a finger or two. So that in case you should die, fate could in fact be reversed and you could go back to a better time, before that final blow - don't worry know one knew but you. Oh, and how the guilt killed. But, heck you couldn't just let it end there.
And it didn't! Which leads to yet another ingenious facet about these books - Multiple adventures and story lines, available in multiple combinations all within one jacket and one title. Wow! I mean, this was Twitter before there was twitter, following threads that lead you down conversational patterns, tracing back to other story lines and patterns. Why weren't these two combined before? It almost seems silly now.
However, like most of these stories do - this got me to thinking, "What other creative uses of Twitter are being engaged in right now, under our noses even? How are people utilizing the tools provided by the micro-blogging site, twee-king these tools to create adventure within the Twitterverse? How hard do you have to look to find them? Are we already and just don't know it?
1. #Journchat - my friend @RochelleVeturis, a "virtual force" on twitter, and past colleague at the LA Times, told me about #journchat - an online community meet up of journalists chatting about the state of the news industry through the simple use of the hashtag search function. All I have to do to watch and/or participate in the conversation is add the #journchat hash to my tweets.
I mean take that in, an entire forum of journalist converging across time zones and geography to hold a discussion in virtuality. That's awesome and so simple. It seems too easy to be true.
Right now, conferences all over the world are engaging in a journchat forum of sorts, just on a smaller scale, throwing out hashtags for people to add to the end of their tweets during a conference session or some other event to bring people into another conversation outside, or alongside the realtime event. I just hosted the posting and twitter feed for such an event last month. People both at the conference and at their respective homes or businesses (unable to attend), discussed topics, shared information, quoted speakers and then retweeted said quotes to the masses.
2. Read a Novel - tweet by tweet: Two projects on Twitter are trying to share an entire novel tweet by tweet: James Joyce’s Ulysses or Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Read an entire novel, at your pace, taking in only a thought at a time. My question is how long would it take you to reach the end?
3. Better yet, Write Your Own Novel: The novel says it is already completed, but I am hoping for a follow-up project in the near future. Even though it’s defunct, you can still read what was written at the 140novel site, color-coded by author. I may start the story up again, complete with my CYOA created story lines. Yes, inspiration strikes again.
4. Alarm Clock? Need to remember something? Send this @timer a direct message, and he'll tweet you back. For example, 'd timer 45 call mom' reminds you in 45 minutes.
5. Track your packages: with @trackthis you can keep your eye on the things making their way to you from FedEx, UPS and DHL shipments. I don't know about you, but I order one thing I need, or want, online a month because I love the anticipation of knowing that soon something is waiting for you, sent to you (yes even if it was from you too), on your doorstep. And I love just as much tracking it across the state or nation. It's just fun.
6. Keep track of who's Adding and Dropping you on Twitter: I recently started using @chirpstats on twitter, a service that once you begin following them, keeps a tally of the people who've followed and unfollowed you over a week or a couple of days, depends on the traffic. I right now, don't have a huge following, but large enough that I can't wade through the muck and find out who stopped following today. This little twitter bound app has actually helped me maintain a customer service base of sorts with people who were thinking of walking away from this tweeter. Almost every time it was someone I was unaware was following me, and so I followed them and they followed back, again.
7. Post like a Pirate: argh maytees, looking to tweet like the ruffians of the sea do? Well, ye be on the right track if yer head toward http://postlikeapirate.com/twitter.php. Simply enter in yer infermation and a message in a bottle yer wish to send out to sea, and the app will reformat it in pirate slang. Oh goodness, if only my pirate-obsessed former editor only tweeted.
I think that's enough for now, but I would love to hear from you about any jewels you've found - Some unexpected and creative new uses of Twitter, be it a complete time suck or the answer to the world's power crisis. Send 'em my way...
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Btw - I'm starting my CYOA game tonight, right now as a matter of fact. Wanna join in? http://twitter.com/peretti/status/10731245477
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