Twitnovels – Crowdsourcing Novel Community
Twitnovels opened on 12th July by two Japanese companies, Heartrails and Marici, is a community based novel writing platform supporting Japanese and English “relayed” novels.
“Relayed Novel” is a form of online writing which you can sometimes see on Japanese forums like 2-channel. There a forum reader starts writing a short text, then someone continues, keep writing by group to finish, if they can. There has been many open source scripts for the “relay novels” and they were set up for years to decade.
Twitnovels offers a specialized platform only for this relayed novel writing, with Twitter account. You may pick up any existing unfinished novel and write a following story. You can also make a new branch at the middle of other novel, to change the direction of the story and create a new derived story.
Branching and Updating are notified to related authors. Feedback to each novel chunk can be commented, too. Those features encourage involved authors to keep writing on and group plotting/elaboration.
Japan is known by its “cellphone novel” culture. There is also a relayed style poet renga tradition lasting 700 years. Social authoring may generate something different from regular novels.
See Also:
English tutorial for Twitnovels on Twitnovels itself
Author Information @akky(Akky AKIMOTO) is one of the first pro-bloggers [J] in Japan. Apart from that, he writes for Asiajin and personal blog [J]. 
[...] “別の続き” が書けるソーシャル小説サービス 「twitnovels」 Twitter アカウントでソーシャル小説が書ける 「twitnovels」 Twitter ID でリレー小説を創作できる 「twitnovels」 Twitnovels – Crowdsourcing Novel Community [...]
[...] TwitNovels（英語版あり）TwitNovelsは先月ローンチしたTwitterをベースにした創作コミュニティーだ。訪問者は自由に小説を書き始めたり、他のユーザーの小説に「別の続き」を書き足したりできる。たとえばこちらでは14人の作者によるグループ編集の小説（日本語）が書かれている。さらに詳しい情報はこちら。 [...]