DISQUS

Those interested in this style of writing may want to check out Protagonize as well. We just introduced solo stories in addition to collaborative ones, and the service is free, though not geared as specifically towards novelists.

Funnily enough, the only social network I get any kind of spam on is Mashable's community site...

Thanks for the post, Duncan! Much appreciated.

That's a pretty good chick lit meets Twitter-rage post, not sure how it'll resonate with our community, but it should definitely generate some interest here. ;)

Also, one quick note about your comment:

"What would educators need to take time away from their typical haunts?"

I've got a bunch of features in development right now to address the needs of educators (I'm specifically getting lots of feeback from ESL teachers, who use action mazes as part of their repertoire of tools.) Some of this should be addressed in the creation of "writing circles", which should allow moderators to run their own areas within the site and control the type of content posted, users included, privacy, and posting rules. I'm also looking at white-labeling the site for educational users, down the road.

-nick / protagonize

Hi Chris-

Thanks for the feedback on Protagonize. There are definitely other things you can do on the site than what you listed that are more tailored to actually participating in the story-writing process, but to be honest, the site is really not intended to be a standard social network.

There is no real way of adding friends, only favourites, which is not necessarily reciprocal and is more a representation of enjoying someone's writing rather than knowing them personally or wanting to be friends with them in some way. It's more of a mutual respect thing and is supposed to be centered around the writing, not the social aspect.

I would also disagree with the commenter who says that anonymity is a bad thing in niche communities. I don't think it's necessarily and I purposefully did not make real names required -- there are many writers on the site who don't want their identities known for a variety of reasons, and I don't want to force them into it. I will, however, make it optional at some point down the road. There really hasn't been any kind of demand for it, though.

I've got a laundry-list of functionality to build out over the next few months, including some stuff you won't find on any other "social networks" (and I use that term loosely.)

I'm a one-man show building this site: I'd would love to address everything, but it's a work in progress (and no, I'm not calling it a beta, since it works great as-is.) I think Protagonize authors would rather use the site right now and let the site's design evolve along with their requests and desires, rather than throw it into an extended private beta until I get everything done that I'd like to have on the site.

Either way, though, your feedback (and that of your readers) is much appreciated, and I'll take all of these various interpretations of the site's purpose into consideration as I keep building it out.

-nick / protagonize

I completely agree with Jevon here.. I've written about this in the past as well ( http://www.nickbouton.com/archives/2008/01/28/f... ) and this tact is exactly what I'm trying to accomplish by building a Facebook application for Protagonize ( http://blog.protagonize.com/2008/03/10/protagon... ).

I can see the immediate appeal of building a FB application to cash in on the huge user base and limited attention span-driven application hopping, but it's not a long-term solution and you're much better off trying to leverage Facebook's reach and dedicated user base for building your own site or product.

As Jevon said, take a feature from your site and extend it into Facebook. You gain the same reach, but you don't have the same dependencies; that way, you lose nothing if Facebook makes wide/sweeping changes to their TOS or goes under at some point.

I completely agree with Jevon here.. I've written about this in the past as well ( http://www.nickbouton.com/archives/2008/01/28/f... ) and this tact is exactly what I'm trying to accomplish by building a Facebook application for Protagonize ( http://blog.protagonize.com/2008/03/10/protagon... ).

I can see the immediate appeal of building a FB application to cash in on the huge user base and limited attention span-driven application hopping, but it's not a long-term solution and you're much better off trying to leverage Facebook's reach and dedicated user base for building your own site or product.

As Jevon said, take a feature from your site and extend it into Facebook. You gain the same reach, but you don't have the same dependencies; that way, you lose nothing if Facebook makes wide/sweeping changes to their TOS or goes under at some point.

Hi Sid,

Thanks for the post! If you actually dig through the site a bit, you'll find that there are some stories that have over 50 branches on them:

http://www.protagonize.com/story/the-screaming-boy
http://www.protagonize.com/story/emily-harmon-high

... just to name a couple. The top stories are ranked by "hotness" but I'm contemplating adding a way to find the all-time most popular stories just in terms of post count, too.

We've got a few more enhancements coming in the next week or two, as well - look for groups (kind of like book clubs or reading circles, in the online sense), email notifications, and a new story rating system very soon!