Twitter: Great works of literature shortened into tweets
Great works of literature are being shortened into 140-character "tweets", in the latest diversion to grow out of the popular Twitter website.
By Matthew Moore writing in London's Daily Telegraph 11 May 2009

Samuel Beckett's bleak play Waiting for Godot is reduced to: "Vladimir and Estragon stand next to tree and wait for Godot. Their status is not updated."

Classics by Charles Dickens, JD Salinger and Jane Austen are among the novels to have been boiled down to a sentence by bookish readers of the micro-blogging site.
Whilst the haiku-like brevity of the synopses will appeal to modern readers more accustomed to skimming their emails than working through 600-word tome, literary purists may be put off by the internet slang.

The fuss surrounding the publication of DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 is summed up with the web acronym for websites that are not suitable for work: "Upper-class woman gets it on with gamekeeper."

Tim Collins, a writer who has collected some of his own potted summaries in a new book, said that while the compositions are intended to be tongue-in-cheek the platform opens up new possibilities for art and education.
"It's very easy to knock Twitter as something you use to tell the world what you ordered in Starbucks this morning, but it's more than that," he said.
"What it is really good for is live-blogging events as they take place, and that can work for historical events too. Over Easter a church in the US re-created the death and Resurrection of Christ through tweets".
He said that the "hashtag" feature of the site, which allows users to engage all their friends in a mass brainstorm, was particularly useful for creative collaboration.

"Maybe we are only just beginning to appreciate the potential of Twitter as an art form," he said.
Mr Collins, whose The Little Book of Twitter is published this week, said it was ironic that the novel he had most trouble shortening was Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, which is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that has much in common with many Twitter updates.

Some examples:
Ulysses
jamesjoyce: Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.

Great Expectations
charlesdickens: Orphan given £££ by secret follower. He thinks it’s @misshavisham but it turns out to be @magwitch

The Catcher in the Rye
jdsalinger: Rich kid thinks everyone is fake except for his little sister. Has breakdown. @markchapman is now following @johnlennon

Pride and Prejudice
janeaustin: Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.

Bridget Jones’s Diary
helenfielding: RT @janeaustin Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.