Another presenter at this week's NYTech meetup (along with uPlayMe): Urbis is a new site that aims to combine social networking and creative writing like poetry and non-fiction. Later, they'll add art, music and film. The site was founded by Steve Spurgat, a playwright based in New York, and claims to have 12,000 members - 13 percent of those are considered "active".
The idea is pretty simple: submit your writing and have it rated and reviewed by your peers. Urbis uses a credits system, meaning that you can receive credits for writing reviews and "spend" them in order to reveal reviews of your own work from others. Users have profile pages, of course, and the ability to add friends and send messages. If you're sensitive to criticism, you can choose to only receive reviews from those in your network, rather than strangers. All your stats meanwhile - uploaded items, reviews written and comments posted - are listed in your account. There's also a lightweight "goals" section (similar to PathConnect, eLifeList and 43Things) - unsurprisingly, the majority of users want to "be published".
That said, writers who post to blogs and social sites are already "publishing", and sites like Lulu let you print your own books on demand - it's not really clear why so many writers still sit around waiting for book deals. The content, meanwhile, is mixed: a lot of dire teen prose mixed with some more accomplished writing. Digging through all this crap makes it near impossible to find the gems, and perhaps Urbis should try ranking submissions in some way. This would also help publishers and talent agents to find upcoming writers in a sea of lackluster entries - perhaps Urbis could even host contests for this purpose (see Bix for a similar idea in the video realm). Even so, such a system would involve deciding which writer is "best" - a totally subjective decision.
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