It started with a Friend request on Facebook.
I knew nothing about this Jory Goudge. It's true, he was Friends with one of my Friends, Canadian TV writer Jill Golick, but was that enough when all his profile told me was that he was into biking and sports? I decided not, and clicked Ignore Request (sorry, Jory).
Later that day, I got another request from a stranger named Marni Siggs. This time it came with a note: "Friend of the blog." She was also Friends with Jill Golick.
I cleverly deduced a pattern at that point, poked around Marni's profile enough to find the website she'd listed, Story2Oh!, and learned she did have something in common with Jory: both are figments of Golick's imagination.
They are supporting characters in a novel approach to entertainment using various web platforms, including Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, Flickr, and even del.icio.us to tell the age-old tale of boy meets girl, girl writes about boy on blog.
The groundwork for the experiment in storytelling, which launches in earnest on Monday, January 14, has already begun.
Ali Barrett writes a knitting blog, Ali Purls, where she compares clingy boyfriend Devon Ross to a poncho she knit out of shedding baby alpaca wool. He's sent her a Facebook gift of a roll of duct tape with the message "we can fix this." Her Facebook wall betrays her flirtation with Simon Beals, author of the boytellsall blog and videocast (and who is himself quite the flirt, choosing to indicate that he and I are Facebook Friends because we "hooked up and it was glorious.")
"The characters are friendly, outgoing and funny," said Golick in a recent interview. "They write on people's walls or go find their blogs and comment on them or play Scrabulous with them. (Real) people love that. There seems to be great excitement around getting a personal greeting from an imaginary friend."
She points out that a real person who's been interacting with the characters since the beginning has been getting Friend requests from people who assume she's fictional, too. "Then there are the people who get all giggly when the characters flirt with them and forget that someone is pulling the puppet strings."
(I have to admit, I was tickled when Devon filled in our Friend details by saying we "made a pilgrimage to the shrine of House together," even though I know Golick is aware of my questionably healthy obsession with the show.)
With revenues from new media at the heart of the current Writers Guild of America strike and television screens full of reality shows and reruns because of it, the timing of Story2Oh! should bring curious eyeballs not just to see the story unfold, but to see if it manages to reach a fragmented TV audience that is increasingly migrating to online entertainment.
Article comments
1 - Phillip Winn
This is brilliant, but I wonder how it will all play out when *everybody* is doing it. The first few get a free pass because they're new and cool. When there are hundreds or thousands of campaigns ongoing... I don't know.
2 - Diane Kristine
Yeah, and as someone I know said, this particular project doesn't seem scalable. In other words, how does it work if it's hugely successful? That one-on-one interaction between fan and character either has to barely scratch the surface or automated, in which case it will be less personal (none of that winking at my obsession with House, or commenting on my blog for example) and therefore less "cool." But for now it's fun and I think they're on to something that maybe can be built on as more people get more experience creating this kind of entertainment for the web.