twtr tales

If you’re coming here for the first time and want to know about the idea behind Twtr Tales without reading further, you can skip to this blog post and tell us know what you think about this project there. I hope you find Twtr Tales interesting and will participate when we go live soon.

This post, on the other hand, will introduce you to writing on the Twtr Tales platform. I hope I can keep it simple and not get too technical along the way. We are in the process of designing this functionality so any feedback you have will be valuable to making the platform better and more robust. Keep them coming please.

The Twtr Tales platform will play host to a number of short stories supporting different causes. So in order to contribute, the first thing you want to do (after creating an account with Twitter, of course) is to identify which story or cause you want to be part of. Every storyline can be clearly identified by a unique #tag assigned to it.

As a writer, contributions to Twtr Tales can be made in two ways from:
1. The twtrtales.com website
2. A twitter client

With the number of spam bots and experts-giving-away-millions-of-dollars-worth-of-free-stuff on the rise, we would like maintain the integrity of this project by manually verifying each account. What do this mean for you? Just follow @twtrtales and @twtl* if you want to contribute so we know you are for real. If we find that you are not real or can be annoying, you’ll be blocked ofcourse and then you won’t be able to post to stories either way, on the website or from twitter.

(*I’ll introduce you to @twtl in a different post, she’s such an attention seeker. Uff!! Her job description, however, can be found later in this post.)

If you are still reading this you don’t need to worry about the spam stuff above, it’s only to keep our house free of pests.

Let’s get posting then from:

1. The twtrtales.com website
This option is for those who don’t tweet much, but want to contribute to the stories. Posting from here is simple. Once you select a story that you want to add to, you’ll be presented with a text box to continue it. Feel free to use your creativity within the 140 character text limit. Please, yes please try not 2 shrtn txt unless it’s adds flavor to the story.
Voila! Now, you’re post is one of the many other prospective continuations to the storyline and it’ll be up for fair voting** by the community.
The best voted** piece is then added to the storyline and the story writing cycle continues until the end.

**Voting deserves a separate post as I’d like your undivided attention and comments in keeping the algorithm fair.

2. A twitter client
Posting from any twitter client (Twitter website, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Seemic, Ubertwitter, HootSuite, etc) follows the same logic. By now, I gather you are following @twtrtales and @twtl, so you should be eligible to post.
Since you love twitter so much and wish that you could do everything from it, we’ll let you spend more time writing creatively on it rather than visit twtrtales.com to post your entries. First follow a particular story with its #tag by filtering the tweets of @twtl**.

**Job Description: @twtl is our delightful assistant who only reads out the last voted lines added to every storyline with their respective #tag, so you know how the stories are unfolding on Twitter.

To post, simply reply to @twtl with a mention of the appropriate story #tag and you’re piece will be up for a vote.

Phew, that was a long confusing read, wasn’t it?

Simply put, in order to post to Twtr Tales, you can do the following:
1. Follow @twtrtales or @twtl to verify yourself.
2. Post directly to the respective story on twtrtales.com using a input area.
3. Post from twitter by replying to @twtl with the corresponding story #tag.

Thanks for following us and reading this far. We’d love to hear from you on how we can improve and make this platform more accessible to the writer in every one of you.