PenFM: Fall back in love with writing via your terrible friends

Novel interface. Get the fanfic authors on board.<p>A tool like this would be perfect for school English classes or creative writing workshops (and alumni).<p>As for making the rest of us plebs pick up the pen again... It's a little harder than just giving us nice tools. Many aspiring writers (not all!) like to hide their work away until they are absolutely certain they will get good feedback, while this is like running around naked in the front yard.<p>Soundcloud has a similar 'get creating' premise and magically minimises that fear of failure factor. I'm not sure how, but it's amazing. The line between supportive and vicious is grey, blurry, narrow. Take care.

Using Ayn "Virtue of Selfishness" Rand to advertise your collaborative writing app is like using Donald Trump to advertise hair-care products.

I just watched the video. It shows a few people typing with each other online (in this case working together on a collaborative story), a picture being dropped down near the end, and then it being posted to Facebook.<p>I understand that the product is the software that allows them to do this but it's not clear to me what unique features are being offered that make it superior to the IM programs and forums people have already been writing collaboratively on for years. What am I missing?

Thanks for posting this, edwardog! Glad someone felt compelled to.<p>I'm the guy behind PenFM. AMA.

Not all of my friends are terrible, though - so I'm somewhat conflicted.

<a href="http://www.pen.fm/read/A-Chance-Autumn-Encounter-PNefec68b4f051c443" rel="nofollow">http://www.pen.fm/read/A-Chance-Autumn-Encounter-PNefec68b4f...</a><p>Demo of our reading experience

Darn, for a moment I thought that this was a site that encourages people to write with a real pen: fall <i></i>back<i></i> in love (PenFM).

This is really popular in China ;-)

Other then the export features to epub, how is this different then just using google docs?

I have a similar project called "Social Typist". <a href="https://github.com/jeswin/socialtypist" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jeswin/socialtypist</a><p>Definitely something worth exploring. Best of luck.<p>Edit: last line.

An online writers' workshop--not the same as Google Docs. There are online subscription systems that support such activities, such as <a href="http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/</a> Getting decent feedback is a problem. Perhaps there is a workable system that would compensate good reviewers. Most writers aren't rich, but they might be willing to pay other writers (who aren't rich) to review their work.