

Neovella: Instantly co-author stories with your friends - kirubakaran
http://neovella.com

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thebooktocome
It's a great idea, but they need a new landing page. Rage faces are okay for
Reddit, but using Y U NO guy is borderline racist.

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nyellin
This looks interesting. I wonder if it will have any influence on NaNoWriMo
(National Novel Writing Month.)

Link: <http://www.nanowrimo.org/>

On a slightly different note, I did NaNoWriMo this year with a friend. I would
have loved a way to quickly give/get live feedback with my writing partner. If
there was a community of other writers who also wanted to take part, that
would have been incredible.

I suppose that I could have used Google Docs, but something geared towards
writers would have been amazing.

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jdp23
Agreed, a friend of mine and I both did NaNo this year and there were plenty
of times when we would have loves something to give/get live feedback on
sections.

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jiffylu
So... they own the stories we create? I was going to say, this would be a
great way to write open source text books but not if Neovella owns the
content.

"2. Copyright. The content, organization, graphics, design, and other matters
related to and created in Neovella are protected under applicable copyrights
and other proprietary laws, including but not limited to intellectual property
laws. The copying, reproduction, use, modification or publication by you of
any such matters or any part of Neovella is strictly prohibited, without our
express prior written permission."

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neoveller
Well we won't sue anyone, but the idea is that once the site becomes
competitive, we can start pushing the top neovellas through Amazon Singles and
then use the percent share calculation we have to distribute a share (more
than our own) of royalties back to the authors in proportion to their
contributions to the entire collection of short stories.

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endlessvoid94
There's nothing on this page except a login form, without a button. Am I
missing something?

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msied
Wow I'm sorry that happened. I guess the traffic is killing our sever now
(shared hosting). I just re-uploaded the the index file and that seemed to
give it the kick it needed. AIM me at thesiedlecki if you run into anymore
errors I can fix for anyone!

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nyellin
Why does the app need permission to access Facebook chat?

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neoveller
Legacy feature from the idea days. I'll remove that now. Thanks for the
reminder!

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hartror
Gah I don't mind using Facebook Connect for sites but when they ask for
everything and the kitchen sink in the permissions dialog I balk and drop out
of the funnel.

Why does neovella need access to my facebook chat? Sure there might be a
legitimate reason but they certainly haven't explained it to me!

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neoveller
Back in the olden days, we figured we'd just plug facebook chat in this to
give us the chatroom functionality. Then we realized people detest facebook,
which means not every user could chat. So now there's a non-facebook login.
We're going to remove the permissions once we have some low traffic time to do
it--too much server load right now to crash everyones' stories temporarily.

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hartror
Fair enough, I would advise going for the bare minimum of basic information
and email address.

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endlessvoid94
I like this a lot.

However, I question whether or not making it realtime is the right way to go.
I could be wrong, but it seems that stories like these would work best on a
more laid-back timeline. I was about to start writing a story, and then I saw
there was a "duration".

I set it to "no limit", and noticed that I can't write anything without
someone else. Why? It's valentine's day, and most of the other folks I know
who'd be interested are all busy. So I'm stuck unable to use your site. I
should be able to do SOMETHING by myself.

I love the idea, though.

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neoveller
If you want to write something alone, why not notepad, or google docs, or
microsoft word? The idea is that it wouldn't be a level playing field if you
could compete on the rankings page with something you had more direct control
over.

As for duration... I can't really see it being used over a long span of time.
Even the 2 minute duration is too long if it's more than 2 or 3 authors in
there. 1 minute really gets the creative juices flowing and instantly makes it
immersive as you always can't wait for the next line--and you don't have to!

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endlessvoid94
Well, because then I wouldn't be using your product. The fact that this is
BUILT for writing stories means I'd be more likely to try it for that reason.
I'm on the west coast, and my friends are all on the east coast (who'd be
interested), but I KNOW they would love to collaborate on something short and
funny. It just wouldn't be realtime.

Sure, we could use google docs collaboration, but that isn't as fun. I'd
rather click a button and have an email sent to my friends that says "Dave
wants your help writing a story!" or something.

The fact that it's ranked seems...excessive. You could be on the right track,
I admittedly know nothing about this space. Maybe I'm not the target user. But
I suck at writing, and I wouldn't use this to compete. I'd use it because it
would be fun.

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neoveller
If we can scale up to a point where people know about us, I'm not again
allowing lone writing. You raise a very good point, and I'm going to admit I
know nothing of the space except my own joy from writing. I misread your
previous comment--allowing users to write at least one entry when alone in an
unlimited turn book was something I thought was in there, but I was careless
not to doublecheck that it was in the release. (Why would we have unlimited
without that???) I'll get that put up soon for you.

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erikpukinskis
Does anyone remember "Yarn"... Amit Gupta (of PhotoJojo, The Daily Jolt) made
it way back in the day (like '00 I want to say). It was a really cool app
along these lines.

Doesn't seem to be any evidence it ever existed on the web, but it looked
awesome, and as I remember had some cool interaction design.

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neoveller
Any thoughts on the Browse page? The books on the shelf are representative of
a few attributes of the books. Width represents page length, height represents
view-count, rating in stars is displayed, number is of authors, and letters
represent the genre of the neovella.

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nyellin
You can only see the browse page when you are logged in. Most people glancing
at the page probably didn't create accounts - I plan on playing around with
the service and _I_ still haven't created an account.

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Groxx
That's an absolutely hilarious website xD Very nicely implemented too!

After a minute of poking around: when you "hide chat" or "hide info", they
lose their mouse-over which would probably be "show chat".

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mkramlich
the service description on the front page pretty much sounds like Reddit
comment thread behavior

