Write a Story on Twitter! A Very VERY Short Story Writing Contest

Copyblogger is hosting a unique contest: tell a story in exactly 140 characters on Twitter. The prize: a 4GB iPod Nano for the best entry!

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, here’s the deal: Twitter is a “micro-blogging” platform, sort of an “IM meets blogging” thing. You can post test-message-sized “tweets” (up to 140 characters) from your cell phone, their website, or a host of desktop Twitter clients (I use Twhirl). Your audience consists of everyone who has chosen to “follow” you — they’ll get your messages on their cell phones, their Twitter homepage, or in their own desktop client. Likewise, you’ll get the messages of everyone that you’re following.

Some people use Twitter as a way of keeping their friends informed of what they’re doing, like test-messaging on steroids. So you’ll see a lot of “Eating with my wife” and “Watching Battlestar Galactica” messages, which can be a little annoying. But there are some real prominent people on Twitter, industry leaders and tech celebrities and even an actual movie star or two. And most of them are posting fairly interesting, unique thoughts — sometimes funny, sometimes profound, sometimes newsy (the China earthquake got a lot of coverage, before it even hit the US mainstream media), and sometimes pushing the boundaries of the medium, like Copyblogger’s contest.

If you’re on Twitter (or convinced you should sign up), follow me! I’m at twitter.com/dwax; just visit my page and click the “Follow” button at the top left of the page (under my picture). Then check out who I’m following in the sidebar on the right to find some people whose posts I find interesting, for whatever reason.

Don’t forget to say “hi” once you’ve added me; you can contact me privately on Twitter by placing “d dwax” at the front of your message, but Twitter’s not really the place for private conversations. Instead, say “hi” in front of the whole Twitter world by adding “@dwax” to your message — that tells the system to make sure I see it, even though I’m not following you (and I’ll be happy to add you to my list of people I follow). Leave a comment here with your twitter name, or email me and let me know you’re following me, and I’ll follow you back.

(About that edit: apparently, you can see @s from people you’re following to people you’re not, but not the other way around. Sorry for the misunderstanding. You should know, nobody actually knows how Twitter works — it’s based on technology rescued from the Roswell crash in the ’30s and still poorly understood.)

Happy tweeting!