Twice failed

Twice now, I’ve tried to coax facebook into working as a writing slate. Once, after two martinis, I pumped out an on-the-run review of a Jonathan Stratham chase-movie, “Transporter III.” I could hardly keep up. The facebook review process failed for a single simple reason: in order to follow a running review, the reader had to continuously update his/her page to see my status(es). Too much dedication from readers required, particularly from a social network site. But, nice try, nonetheless.

More recently, I tried to produce dialogue via facebook status lines, but failed because the continuity was lost, except on my own page (and who reads that?). There was a worse problem, though. One I can’t fix. My dialogue ran in reverse order. Egad. But, nice try, nonetheless.

I have two thoughts about my failures, maybe three. I can’t be the first person to have tried this. Second, it’s not yet possible to create live self-updating contiguous posts via social networks. Too bad. Any developers listening? This should be possible, a value-added feature. Mr. Zuckerman? There’s poetry to be done, songs to be written, short stories…

Second point (or is this the third?), the prosthetic element of Web 2.0 social software played no role in the “creative” process, no symbiosis, no synergy, no ghost in the machine, just chatter and clutter. In fact, the social network software got in the way. (I may try this with a Hash (#) Twitter, we’ll see. It could work.) Worse, no one gave a damn, but what else is new? No difference to me.

Time to make a statement:

Social networking should offer a new twist on publishing, something live and interactive and available to readers — if there are any (left) — to comment and possibly drive the story. See my post below on the Japanese women who write novels on their cell phones. What am I missing? What is social networking missing (a simple, intuitive way to reverse order status lines)? What have those Japanese thumbsters got that I ain’t got?