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?

Smallplaces - a Twitter novel written by news media editor/novelist N.L. Belardes.

Slice - A novel put out by Penguin Books was the story of a girl and her parents and was delivered by serialized LiveJournal and Twitter postings. (our coverage)

Novelsin3lines - From Félix Fénéon, these tweets are the "poems and novels and novels he never otherwise wrote."

GoodCaptain - The completed novel "The Good Captain," was a story by Jay Bushman and was based on "Benito Cereno" by Herman Melville.

Mrichtel - Matthew Richtel, NY Times reporter, is experimenting with Twitter as a place to write a real-time thriller. His is about a man who wakes up with amnesia and has a haunting feeling he is a murderer.

3MIAB - UK T-Shirt shop conceptTshirts started twittering a novel called "Three Men in a Boat," but seemed to have given up a year ago.

140novel - A Twitter novel created by Molly Wood, Tom Merritt, and Jason Howell of CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast alongside Leo Laporte, who suggested the idea when he was guest on their show one day. (Read the whole thing here).

DailyLit - This online book club site which lets you read books via email or RSS recently added Twitter reading groups, too. Now you can read the following novels via Twitter and more will become available when these are completed. 

• TwitterID: DailyLitMagicK
  Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 
• TwitterID: DailyLitPride
  Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
• TwitterID: DailyLitSucceed
  Tom Peters's 100 Ways to Succeed/Make Money

Unfortunately, they seem to have missed the concept of the Twitter novel altogether and are using Twitter to link to their web site instead:

Twittories - a collaborative effort where anyone can contribute to a Twitter novel that only runs for 140 entries. An author can only submit one entry per "twittory." Read the first Twittory here. 

Quillpill - Write your own Twitter novel! Quillpill novels aren't actually on Twitter itself, but use the app's Twitter-like 140-character-like system. You're encouraged to write and read novels from your call phone and they offer both a mobile and iPhone version.(our coverage)

Big in Japan Doesn't Mean Big Everywhere

Some of these efforts have been fun to follow, like 140novel and the latest "Twiller" from Matt Richtel, but could it be that they already have appeal because of the well-known personas of the authors? In Japan, the cell phone novels are making stars out of unlikely authors - like high school girls, for example, who were writing the short fiction in between their classes. Would a Twitter novel written by an unknown have the same appeal here? So far, we don't have a true winner yet. Perhaps this is one trend that doesn't translate?

In theory, the system might work, but LiveBook may rely too heavily on its points scheme. Points aren't just used to add lines to the story, but are also a sort of creative currency within the application. It takes 5 points to add a new sentence, for example, starting a new chapter costs 20, and every time you vote for a sentence it costs you a point. Earning points is, according to the FAQ, a matter of inviting new users.

Presumably, having a sentence selected for inclusion also earns you points, but what this adds up to is a book that heavily relies on the popularity of the app to succeed. Since new users only start with 10 points (enough to add a couple of sentences or dole out a few votes before going bust), the app has to be popular or run the risk of having very few users with enough points to contribute -- which would suddenly make the crowd a lot smaller. Right now, the Facebook version of LiveBook has 45 active daily users.

Other Innovative Ways to Write Online

We've looked at a number of innovative new collaborative writing applications on ReadWriteWeb over the past year. Here's a brief overview:

Recently, Sarah Perez reviewed the very slick Protagonize, on which users can work together to create choose-your-own-adventure style stories, as well as more traditional linear collaborative fiction. Last June, we looked at six "fiction 2.0" applications. Collaborative writing apps Novlet, Portrayl, and Ficlets, are still going strong, but Unblokt, has since shut down, which is too bad because it had produced some suprisingly readable fiction (note, you can actually still read the completed stories by navigating to this link).

We also looked at the National Novel Writing Month, in which people attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a single month. For the 2007 edition this past November, there were a whopping 1,187,931,929 words written, and of the 101,000 participants, over 15,000 managed to crank out a full 50k word novel. For the even more insane writer, there's the 3 Day Novel contest during which people compete for cash prizes by writing a novel in 3 days. They actually publish the winners, some of which have won awards.

On more than one occasion we've mentioned the One Million Penguins Project. A collaboration between De Montfort University and Penguin Publishing in the UK, the idea was to see if a novel could be written by the crowd via a wiki. The result? According to one organizer it was "unlike anything I’ve read before." The novel has been broke up into sections, which you can read online. The banana version may be the oddest.

Clearly, there are a lot of new and interesting ways to write fiction online, and participating in any one of which can be a lot of fun. What's your favorite?