Sony Launches Words Move Me, A Literary Twitter Clone
August 25, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
In conjunction with today’s announcement of a new wireless Sony Reader, the electronics giant plus launched a literary clone of Twitter called Words Move Me. The site falls into the category of viral social marketing—there are urls to the Sony Reader website and eBook store plastered on every page—and was pobviously rushed out before it was ready, but it shows some promise as a niche micro-messaging network centered around sharing quotes from books.
The view is very basic. You paste in passages up to 255 characters lengthy, add the book title and author, and post it to your stream. You can additionally add tags. You can follow other folks, or they can follow you. When you go on an author, a book title, or another user, you see more passages from that source that have been shared on Words Move Me. So far, so good.
The problem is that right now it is a self-contained site. Facebook and Twitter integration are coming “in phase 2,” I’m told. whether you can’t share your favorite book passages with your existing network, that isn’t going to go far. But it’s coming.
Avid readers love to share quotes, but that is not the only things they like to share. Quotes and passages are all good things to share, and can serve as hooks for folks to come back and explore further (and mabe even buy a book).
The concept reminds me of iWise, which is a way follow famous folks through their quotations. It’s Twitter for dead people. And iWise lets you Tweet out your favorite quotes, or get random ones right in your Twitter feed. There is an opportunity for several more focused micro-messaging sites, but they cannot exist in a vacuum.
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