How To Start A Social Networking Site

David Artsmith  -  The roleplaying social network is a new concept in communication and storytelling. It involves using the various means of online communication to interact with others under the guise of fictional characters. The purpose of this is to create an interactive, multiplayer story, which can be infinitely complex, depending on the number of people who become engaged in its telling.

This is a trend which is found across all of the social networking media. Within myspace, facebook, and other standard profile communities it is often shunned, due to the fact that those sites were built to allow real people to connect with one another. However alternative sites such as http://www.RolePages.com are pioneering the art of fictional social networking by creating similar spaces which are set up specifically for such activities.

Fictional blogging is one way that many people have used web 2.0 technologies to create interactive stories. This is a rather rudimentary form, where the journal is kept in character, and then the comments section is sued to allow interaction or comment on the plot of the characters life.

Twitter is another place where people are engaging in fictional social networking. From twitter accounts set up under famous character name such as Darth Vader, or Frodo Baggins, to entire storyline being created back and forth in tweets and re-tweets by people operating at under 140 characters per message.

The truth is that social networking was originally created to help people tell a story, the story of their own lives. These same technologies are now being utilized in the telling of made up stories. On roleplaying social networks tales are character centric, focusing on the development of personality much more than plot. In fact plot often only comes in the form of interactions between multiple characters.

These interactions can take many different forms, and can even stretch across multiple media. A character can update their twitter with a plot move, which can then be carried onto a myspace profile, and then stretched across to a rolepages forum where the rest of the event in question can be fleshed out.

The idea behind this is to evolve the story to a new level, where it is totally interactive, community generated, and driven by infinite creativity lurking in every corner of the web.

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