ReadWriteWeb

In Japan, mobile phone novels called "keitai shousetus" have become so successful that they accounted for half of the ten best-selling novels in 2007. Here in the Western world several would-be novelists are attempting to use Twitter to create the same phenomenon.

Some of the novels tweeted so far have been interesting and engaging, but others, sadly, appear to be abandoned. Will micro-format fiction ever take off here as it did in Japan?

LiveBook is a new collaborative writing project that aims to write two separate novels via applications on two different social networks: one on Facebook, the other on Bebo. The Facebook novel, "Helen and her Facebook" chronicles a girl named Helen who has just recently signed up on the social network, while the Bebo version, "Brian from Bebo," follows the similar tale, though this time it's a boy and Bebo. The stories are written sentence by sentence by the members each network with no outside editorial influence, though co-founder Dmitry Honcharenko thinks there exists the possibility for the two books to reference each other and for Helen and Brian to meet.