Mark Williams

I’ve been folding stories on FoldingStory. If you are not aware of it, the idea is to collaboratively create stories. The twist is that each user can only see the last user’s contribution and you only have 4 minutes and 180 characters to write your lines (called “fold”). They say, “FoldingStory™ is a game in which players write one line of a story, fold the paper, and pass it to the next person. Write. Fold. Pass.™ It’s as simple as that.”

It’s a bit like telling a story via twitter, but where you can only see the last few tweets. Makes for some very bizarre and beautiful stories.

It reminds me of my BBS‘ing days (years ago). Some of these sites had a notion of “collaborative story writing.” It was never as sophisticated as FoldingStory. In those days, BBS’s were dominated by young males and the stories would often skew off to a special place that could only be described as a wannabe Penthouse letter. It was tiring to have every story end in someone’s freakish little fantasy. The stories at FoldingStory, while odd and occasionally mind-bending, have been relatively clean.

They have avoided much of the puerile endings, but I think that may be more a factor of their relative obscurity than active management. I haven’t spent time counting their active user base, but I believe it to be small.

The community manager in me wonders how long that can continue. They have clear rules about what they do and do not want to see, but there does not seem to be a means to report a problem to the site owners. How long until they get hit with a spammer or a scammer?

At a minimum, I would suggest implementing:

• Report a problem post
• Duplicate post detection (This may exist – I didn’t test.)

Another concern is that each “fold” can be voted by other members once the story has concluded. One click and you vote for it. There does not appear to be any give and take economy to keep the “likes” down. Everyone can vote on every post, with the obvious exception of your own. While I have appreciated every vote I have received, some of the users appear to be voting indiscriminately on everything. Based on watching this type of system on many sites and my own implementations of reputation systems, I worry about the long term loss of usefulness of “like”. We’ll see what they do with it.

I also wonder what their monetization plan is. I doubt that Google Adwords is a good choice as there is little gestalt contextual cues for it to work from. I could see an option for “sponsored folds” but you would have to control the number to avoid member backlash. I can also see some options around corporate team building and idea generation. It is possible they could license the ideas and tech. In the end, it is possible this is someone’s side project – not everything has to make money.

Regardless of those concerns, FoldingStory is engaging and entertaining. I’ve written 100+ folds at this point and I cannot seem to stop. Thanks to Strong Street for putting it out there.