Neovella: Instantly co-author stories with your friends

by kirubakaran • 15 years ago

36 26 15 years ago

nyellin4• 15 years ago

This looks interesting. I wonder if it will have any influence on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month.)

On a slightly different note, I did NaNoWriMo this year with a friend. I would have loved a way to quickly give/get live feedback with my writing partner. If there was a community of other writers who also wanted to take part, that would have been incredible.

I suppose that I could have used Google Docs, but something geared towards writers would have been amazing.

bmelton• 15 years ago

I started TypeMotion a couple of years ago for that very purpose, but I never promoted it (even to friends / family) because I wanted to wait until 'before NaNoWriMo' to announce it, and completely forgot the next year.

Then, I decided to rip the guts out of it because I decided that the pinnacle of what I wanted it to do looked exactly like the comments on 'djangobook.com', where user-contributed edit suggestions sit right in the left margin, represented by little bubbles -- then something else came along and my pet project got discarded. :-\

jdp23• 15 years ago

Agreed, a friend of mine and I both did NaNo this year and there were plenty of times when we would have loves something to give/get live feedback on sections.

Groxx• 15 years ago

That's an absolutely hilarious website xD Very nicely implemented too!

After a minute of poking around: when you "hide chat" or "hide info", they lose their mouse-over which would probably be "show chat".

endlessvoid945• 15 years ago

There's nothing on this page except a login form, without a button. Am I missing something?

nyellin4• 15 years ago

I see the same now, but there was originally a slideshow and site tour.

Here is a summary:

1. You start a story and invite a few friends

2. Your friends take turns writing small sections of the story, in a predetermined order.

3. Other users can view your story, add comments, and vote for the best stories.

4. The best stories are published with an Amazon service.

endlessvoid945• 15 years ago

Ah, sounds cool. I'd like to try it..

msied• 15 years ago

Wow I'm sorry that happened. I guess the traffic is killing our sever now (shared hosting). I just re-uploaded the the index file and that seemed to give it the kick it needed. AIM me at thesiedlecki if you run into anymore errors I can fix for anyone!

nyellin4• 15 years ago

Why does the app need permission to access Facebook chat?

endlessvoid945• 15 years ago

No worries. Just signed in with my facebook account, and just as a heads up, the pre-filled email address didn't have a "@" symbol, it had the unicode: \u0040

endlessvoid945• 15 years ago

I like this a lot.

However, I question whether or not making it realtime is the right way to go. I could be wrong, but it seems that stories like these would work best on a more laid-back timeline. I was about to start writing a story, and then I saw there was a "duration".

I set it to "no limit", and noticed that I can't write anything without someone else. Why? It's valentine's day, and most of the other folks I know who'd be interested are all busy. So I'm stuck unable to use your site. I should be able to do SOMETHING by myself.

I love the idea, though.

neoveller6• 15 years ago

If you want to write something alone, why not notepad, or google docs, or microsoft word? The idea is that it wouldn't be a level playing field if you could compete on the rankings page with something you had more direct control over.

As for duration... I can't really see it being used over a long span of time. Even the 2 minute duration is too long if it's more than 2 or 3 authors in there. 1 minute really gets the creative juices flowing and instantly makes it immersive as you always can't wait for the next line--and you don't have to!

endlessvoid945• 15 years ago

Well, because then I wouldn't be using your product. The fact that this is BUILT for writing stories means I'd be more likely to try it for that reason. I'm on the west coast, and my friends are all on the east coast (who'd be interested), but I KNOW they would love to collaborate on something short and funny. It just wouldn't be realtime.

Sure, we could use google docs collaboration, but that isn't as fun. I'd rather click a button and have an email sent to my friends that says "Dave wants your help writing a story!" or something.

The fact that it's ranked seems...excessive. You could be on the right track, I admittedly know nothing about this space. Maybe I'm not the target user. But I suck at writing, and I wouldn't use this to compete. I'd use it because it would be fun.

thebooktocome• 15 years ago

It's a great idea, but they need a new landing page. Rage faces are okay for Reddit, but using Y U NO guy is borderline racist.

neoveller6• 15 years ago

Any thoughts on the Browse page? The books on the shelf are representative of a few attributes of the books. Width represents page length, height represents view-count, rating in stars is displayed, number is of authors, and letters represent the genre of the neovella.

nyellin4• 15 years ago

You can only see the browse page when you are logged in. Most people glancing at the page probably didn't create accounts - I plan on playing around with the service and I still haven't created an account.

hartror2• 15 years ago

Gah I don't mind using Facebook Connect for sites but when they ask for everything and the kitchen sink in the permissions dialog I balk and drop out of the funnel.

Why does neovella need access to my facebook chat? Sure there might be a legitimate reason but they certainly haven't explained it to me!

neoveller6• 15 years ago

Back in the olden days, we figured we'd just plug facebook chat in this to give us the chatroom functionality. Then we realized people detest facebook, which means not every user could chat. So now there's a non-facebook login. We're going to remove the permissions once we have some low traffic time to do it--too much server load right now to crash everyones' stories temporarily.

hartror2• 15 years ago

Fair enough, I would advise going for the bare minimum of basic information and email address.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

the service description on the front page pretty much sounds like Reddit comment thread behavior

jiffylu• 15 years ago

So... they own the stories we create? I was going to say, this would be a great way to write open source text books but not if Neovella owns the content.

"2. Copyright. The content, organization, graphics, design, and other matters related to and created in Neovella are protected under applicable copyrights and other proprietary laws, including but not limited to intellectual property laws. The copying, reproduction, use, modification or publication by you of any such matters or any part of Neovella is strictly prohibited, without our express prior written permission."

neoveller6• 15 years ago

Well we won't sue anyone, but the idea is that once the site becomes competitive, we can start pushing the top neovellas through Amazon Singles and then use the percent share calculation we have to distribute a share (more than our own) of royalties back to the authors in proportion to their contributions to the entire collection of short stories.

wccrawford• 15 years ago

Yup. This prevents me from considering using the site.

Also, it's probably not enforceable. You can't sign away your rights. Anything you write is YOUR copyright, not some machine's. They can say that have unrevokable rights to publish and distribute, but they can't take your rights away.

And under that, I -still- wouldn't use it.

erikpukinskis• 15 years ago

Does anyone remember "Yarn"... Amit Gupta (of PhotoJojo, The Daily Jolt) made it way back in the day (like '00 I want to say). It was a really cool app along these lines.

Doesn't seem to be any evidence it ever existed on the web, but it looked awesome, and as I remember had some cool interaction design.

Neovella: Instantly co-author stories with your friends

Related Stories