750words.com is a site that I love. It is set up as an online way to write your "morning pages"- 3 pages written every day, generally long hand, as a way to clear your mind and get ready for the day ahead. This site has a word processor that notifies you when you've written approximately 3 pages, or 750 words. Not only is that rather nice, but it gives you badges for each "streak" of days you get- a turkey, for example, is three days in a row. It also allows you to track "metadata". Structured as "WORD: answer", it can track how many drinks you have a night, how happy you are feeling, whatever you decide to score. (It generally works best on a numerical scale, as the metadata is graphed for you. I, however, also track what books I am reading. It doesn't graph well, but it's interesting to see what I write based on what I'm reading, or if they even correlate at all).
Usefulness: 4 out of 5
Because 750words has a specific premise (write 750 words a day), it may not be perfect for everyone. However, the word processor and the premise are not why I find this site so useful and so dear to me. Those badges are incredibly motivating. Seriously. They are a great idea. In a similar vein to fitocracy, the fitness site that "levels you up" based on how much you work out, 750words badges for day streaks is something that keeps you going. If you have, say a 100 day Pheonix badge, you are NOT going to want to break that streak and lose it all.
The metadata is also really cool, as it plays to my sciency side. I like the idea of being able to track certain values over the course of your writing.
The 750words site also breaks down each day's work into percentages. It tells you how happy what you wrote was, which words you used the most and whether you were feeling introverted or extroverted (or more accurately, whether your WRITING was so). The statistics make for a really interesting understanding of your creative work.
Fun: 3 out of 5
Seriously, it's the badges that make me happy. Nothing else is really fun. (Well, I mean, I find the data fun, but I feel that's not an overwhelming majority in the opinions of most writers.)
Hipster: 3 out of 5
It's pretty obscure. I mean, most online writing tools can be pretty obscure. A lot of 750words problem is that it ends up used more like a diary and less like a creative writing tool. Not that that's a problem, necessarily. It just changes the demographic and means that you hear fewer writers' voices in the discussion of the product.
This is really cool! I like the categories you're using to review the generators. To me, 750 words definitely sounds like the coolest to me,but that's just because I need enforcement to do anything.
ReplyDelete