I attended CaseCamp last night, a social media conference that was held at Circa in Toronto, a shrine to kidrobot. The event itself has grown from a few people gathering at a happy hour, to 500 people clamoring for advice on social community trends and pizza. The speakers were interesting, but I was especially fascinated by Jill Golick and her latest project Story2Oh!

Her whole presentation was based around storytelling on the web. Basically she was motivated by the fact that she hasn’t seen great storytelling online, nothing that takes advantage of the medium. So in a proactive measure, she holed herself up with several screenwriters for a weekend and they developed a script for 8 different fictional characters. That Monday they launched Facebook profiles, twitter pages, and YouTube galleries for all of them, thus setting the stage for a character-driven story that would unfold across the internet through social networking sites.

The drama was fed to readers in pieces, if you were a friend of theirs on Facebook you would follow the plot via feeds and status updates. YouTube provided the handheld video portions of the story and places like Twitter and De.licio.us completed the narrative with what kinds of advice and pages they were looking for depending on their current dilemma. They also even had blogs.

I don’t know how successful the run was since I wasn’t involved, but I thought it was a really interesting and creative concept that tried to use the full potential of social communities as a unique way to tell a story.

A few days before this, I had actually unknowingly befriended one of the fictional characters Ali Barrett. Ordinarily I don’t “friend” people I don’t know, but several people friends had also “friended” her so I just assumed it was a case of me not remembering an introduction. It was a pretty funny moment when Golick mentioned that Barrett was one of her fictional characters. It was a mixture of hilarious shock and then regret that I hadn’t been in on the story sooner.

After her talk there was one woman who was very offended at having been fooled into befriending a fictional character. And in fact, Facebook has today since deleted all 8 profile pages. It’s too bad, it was something different and would have been fun to see how the next “episode” played out; as someone commented on the Story2Oh blog, it was like having someone knock on your door and ask you to come out and play.

In all honesty, I think this was a bad move for Facebook. One third of the people on there aren’t really who they say they are anyway and if you’re accepting “friend” notifications from people you don’t know, you’re opening yourself up to anything. The internet as a whole has always been buyer beware.

Footnote: this kind of reminded me of a multiplatform version of the “Lonelygirl15” web-based stories that played out on YouTube in 2006 and 2007.