Figment is a new initiative by former New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear and developer Jacob Lewis designed as “sort of literary Facebook for the teenage set”, according to the New York Times.
The site allows members to share what they’re reading but also add their own writing and comment on writing. In building the site Lewis discovered that they didn’t want to just make friends in the Facebook sense, but what they wanted “was to read and write and discover new content, but around the content itself.”
The idea for the site came out of an article Goodyear wrote for the New Yorker, “I heart Novels” about Japanese teen novels which are written for mobile phones. Figment, however, is more ambitious than just mobile content allowing readers and writers to read stories from any web device. As Lewis sees it “We wanted people to be able to write whatever they wanted in whatever form they wanted. We give them a piece of paper and say, ‘Go’.”