John "Old Man's War" Scalzi sez,
I'm a principal for a new site called Ficlets, a fun site for people to post and collaborate on short fiction. Here's how it works:
You, as a writer, post a very short (not more than 1,024 characters) piece of fiction or a fiction fragment on the Ficlets site. People come to Ficlets to read what you've written, and to comment on your piece. If they want to, they can also write a "sequel" to your story or story fragment, carrying the story forward from where you left it. Or, alternately, they can write a "prequel," explaining how you got to where you are in the story. All sorts of people can write all sorts of sequels and prequels — and of course, other people can write sequels and prequels to those. What you end up with is a story with multiple authors and multiple branchings — lots of possibilities and surprises.
All the words written on the Ficlets site are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. This makes it easier to play and share fairly, and should also assuage any fears that AOL, which created and runs the site, will do something nefarious with the text. The site requires people to sign in to post and to comment (to keep the spam at bay), but the site accepts OpenID as well as AOL/AIM screennames.
In addition to the Ficlets themselves, there's also a Ficlets Blog which will highlight interesting ficlets, be a place for author interviews, and provide commentary on the pursuit and profession of writing.
See also:
Sequel to Scalzi's Old Man's War: The Ghost Brigades
Women sf greats read free audio of John Scalzi novella
John Scalzi's Old Man's War free for service people in Iraq/Afghanistan
Being Poor — meditation by John Scalzi
Agent to the Stars: comic sf about an alien race's Hollywood agent
Forever War with better sex, Starship Troopers without the lectures: Old Man's War
