Happy Birthday

By scriptor1

What a year it's been. Scriptopus.com came online just before midnight on 18 March 2010. Since then thousands of you have visited, and have developed or launched dozens of stories. There's been poetry and prose, fast-paced dialogue and dreamy meditations, sharp plotting and memorable characters. You've been generous with your feedback, advice, compliments (thanks!) and complaints (also thanks - I need to know what doesn't work so I can fix it).

To those of you who may wonder why things haven't evolved even faster, given the hyperspeed of the webworld: it's a question of scale, and resources. Scriptopus isn't a big project with dozens of staff and lots of money. It's an idea I had on a train, on the way to work in London one dreary summer morning in 2009. It took many months of thinking; talking with friends, family and IT professionals; drafting creative, business and marketing plans; and, not least, saving up the pennies, to be able to turn it from a figment of my imagination into the collective invention which we have all participated in for the past 365 days. It's still a solo venture without any outside investment.

So progress has been slow, but steady. The big innovation over the past couple of months has been adding Facebook Connect, so that users of Facebook can log in or register instantly. This also makes it easier to post links to what you've written (or just to stories you particularly like) on your Facebook profile. We also incorporated the AddThis sidebar to allow instant sharing with all social networks; and we'd previously integrated an email functionality, so that you can send a link to friends who will get a kick out of what you've written (and hopefully pitch in and write the next section), and also automatically receive an email whenever there's a new contribution to a story thread that you have helped to author.

The inescapable conclusion is that Scriptopus is going social. That's not surprising for a web app designed to enable collaborative writing. I suspect that writing groups will develop, agreeing a title and theme and then pinging it around amongst themselves to quickly generate a (fairly) coherent story. That will be great and I'm looking forward to it, and to your thoughts on how it should work. I have a feeling it will be the next big phase of development.

But that's not the only thing that I think Scriptopus will become. One of the things I wanted it to do was provide a resource and an outlet for those in need of random, non-committal, regular writing exercises, and it does that beautifully with no need for (or risk of) engagement with anyone else: here's an idea, you've got 15 minutes and 1000 characters to develop it, you don't need to worry about what happens next. Off you go.

This tells me that even within highly-social online ecosystems, we can build niches for the creative introvert; and we should, if we want to nuture the genius of the individual as well as the collective. I'd like to think that Scriptopus will evolve into an environment that nurtures literary loners as well as groups.

Write On!

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