The “Novels in Three Lines” project on Twitter has been talked about a lot in the last couple of weeks – both on blogs as well as over Twitter itself. Some highlights:

• @Twitch: novelsin3lines – the second twitter feed worth following, the first being the Mars rover. Everyone else can go to hell.
• @Condalmo: Blast from the past: “Burning with electoral fervor”
• @Phil Gyford: Very much enjoying Félix Fénénon’s Twitters from 1906 Paris
• @gabrielle: I think @novelsin3lines will be an excellent time waster!
• @itsrob: favorite new twitter user
• @rossh: just to share, @novelsin3lines is really pretty awesome.
• @Mica Scalin: Very excited to follow @novelsin3lines great idea!
• @Dave Mason: I am completely digging @novelsin3lines
• @jenks: someone turned novelsin3lines into a twitter account. Cool idea for a really cool book.
• Noah Brier: My friend Naveen announced a new side project [...]
• ReadWriteWeb: From Félix Fénéon, these tweets are the “poems and novels and novels he never otherwise wrote.” [sic]
• Le Monde: J’y remarque pour commencer, bien sûr, une traduction du merveilleux Félix Fénéon … comme quoi… nous n’inventons rien en ce début de 21ème siècle… ne manqueront pas de dire les plus sceptiques. Et voici d’où semble être venue l’idée de le reprendre .
• Media Bistro: “It’s a brilliant idea,” NYRB managing editor Sara Kramer told me when I emailed her looking for the backstory. “I only wish we had thought of it.”

You can use Twitter search to find more people who are talking about “Novels”.

Félix Fénéon:

Scratching himself with a revolver with an overly sensitive trigger, M. Édouard B. removed the tip of his nose in the Vivienne precinct house.

Bonnaut, a locksmith in Montreuil, was chatting on his doorstep when the gangster called Shoe Face struck him twice with a knife.

Novels in Three Lines is a collection of more than a thousand anonymously-published blurbs that appeared in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. They were all penned by Félix Fénéon who worked as a clerk in the French War Department. Luc Sante, the translator, describes Félix and his “novels”:

They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage [...] They depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy.

My friend Kio and I thought it was a perfect narrative to bring to Twitter. She talked to a friend at NYRB (the publisher) and got permission to reprint the text in serial form over Twitter. NYRB are quite excited about it.

You can follow Novels in Three Lines on Twitter at ‘novelsin3lines‘. I suggest tracking it directly using your phone for best results. We’ve agreed to do two updates per day: once at 9am (EST) in the morning like a newspaper and once at 9pm (EST) at night to give you something to smile/talk about with your friends when you’re about town.

I won’t go into a discussion here about why the use of the word “friends” in social networks is incorrect or how much of a waste of time it is to recreate my social graph on every site. That is perhaps the topic of a future entry. It’s almost a given these days that all social sites connect me with friends or interesting people. I actually find that keeping up with some of these connections is useful, especially with networks like Facebook or Twitter.

But you know what would be really nice? Instead of just saying:

jack is now following your updates on Twitter.

Or:

Michele added you as a friend on Facebook. We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, friends with Michele.

Can you give me some hints about how we could be connected and why you are attempting to connect us in the first place? Perhaps a brief blurb about their bio or their hometown. How about letting me know how Jack and I could be related? Show me which friends we have in common. I’m pretty sure you can do this in like one SQL query (and all without even breathing hard). This is especially useful in networks where everyone uses nicknames instead of their full name.