Exactly 90 minutes ago I had an idea. My wife and I were putting our kids to bed and we were doing something we have done with them since they were about two years of age. One of us starts a new story by telling a few lines and then the next person picks up where they left off and so on. I thought “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation” and started to wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of folks on twitter collaborate on a short story – 140 characters at a time.

After I put the kids to bed, I quickly googled to see if anyone had already done something similar and couldn’t see anything (although even if it isn’t 100% original I don’t care, it’ll still be fun), registered the domain name TWITTORIES.com (a twittory is a twitter story), threw together a wiki using wikispaces, and exactly 90 minutes later I am launching it to the world.

The basic idea is that each twittory will last for 140 entries and each entry can be a maximum of 140 characters. Twittory #1, which I have already entitled “The Darkness Inside”, will commence as soon as we have 140 people signed up here and will conclude, no matter where the story is up to, when we have the full 140 entries. 140 x 140 is… a story with a maximum of 19600 characters.

I always knew Marshall McLuhan was onto something…