"After millions of words of imitation ... I suddenly made the breakthrough ... into originality" - Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
I stumbled across a really nifty tool today called 750 words. As you may have noticed, I’m really trying to increase the amount of writing I do, starting with (hopefully) two blog posts a weekday. However, sometimes you may want to do regular writing without it being public. In comes 750 words.
The site stems from the idea that writing daily is good exercise for the mind and that sometimes you just want to dump your brain into a document without having to worry about coherence, SEO or an audience. It accomplishes its goal handily.
You sign up to the site using Facebook Connect. The user is then presented with what is pretty much white space with a word counter at the bottom of the screen. Then you type. Boom, mission accomplished.
The site has a number of other nifty features. It turns the process into a bit of a game, issuing monthly challenges, assigning points and a leaderboard, and even discovering all sorts of interesting statistics by running a semantic engine over your writing. You can also designate statuses in each post through what is essentially a short-code. You can also receive badges and see how other people (including followed friends) do with their writing.
It can also be set to lock after a period of no activity, so you don’t have to worry about your inner most thoughts being seen by the boss while you are on the way to the bathroom.
All that being said, I think the most beneficial element of the platform is its simplicity. The perfect setting to let the words just flow out. Burn those bad words and when you finally hit something good, you can bring it to the public.
On the other hand, there is always penzu if you are looking for military grade encryption for your thoughts. Of course, the caveat when it comes to ‘privacy’ on the internet is that your data exists on a server somewhere and it is therefore never truly private.
Credit goes to Kevin Loker, from whose tweet I found the site.
Thanks for the write up… Was looking for privacy policy for 750words since their FAQ is somewhat vague…