Perhaps it's no coincidence that it's very easy to mistake Twitterers for Twits, or having Tweeted for Twat*. The explosion of mainstream popularity of the Twitter format (Meet At The Gate has been a Twit Twitterer for almost two years) has inspired wordsmiths of all levels of talent to attempt doing something new with words within 140 characters.
So it's hardly surprising that the phenomenon of Twitter fiction has been born. Long before Twitter (2003 to be exact, a lifetime in Internet terms) was the Japanese SMS novel - keitai shosetsu - that published new fiction in easily digestible snippets, sent to subscribers' mobile phones. That literary critics turned up their noses at the quality of these novels didn't damage their commercial appeal one bit.
(See what I did there? A little IT humour for you.)
What can writers accomplish on Twitter, then? I found a page for someone attempting to Tweet an entire novel - which is cool for US followers who can receive the story in chronological order via SMS, but us poor (non-Vodafone) UK users don't have that luxury at all and it's really confusing, clicking on the More button to try and reach the beginning of the novel and reading in reverse chronological order.
(Another Twitter novel has been brought to my attention since I wrote this.)
What might work better is micro Flash fiction that purports to tell an entire story within the 140-character limit. But as many have noted (including Thomas Abbs, who wrote about hint fiction last month), writing briefly is easy, but doing it well is bloody difficult. So while there are many Tweet fiction sites out there (Twister Twae, AStoryIn140, twitterfiction, microprose, InstantFiction, and nanoism are just a few I know about), I think the literary 'signal to noise' ratio would be far too low for the average reader, unless the goal is to practise writing over entertaining readers!
* I did not come up with any of those jokes myself.
