Twitter has just announced on their blog the launch of Twitter Tales – tales.twitter.com – a series of compelling stories of Twitter users around the globe. Initial articles in this growing collection include @natashabadhwar, a New Delhi filmmaker whose poetry and photographs found an instant following after famous film critic Roger Ebert retweeted her in March 2010.

There’s the story of a San Francisco commuter who setup a communal account - @Caltrain – for hundreds of commuters in the Bay Area to contribute real-time information about problems with their journeys and @theblogess, a reluctant Texan blogger whose wry wit struck a chord with tweeps the world over and whose hilarious practice of putting ‘Wolverines’ on take-away food orders so employees had to shout it out caught on and propelled #wolverines into trending topics.

It’s unfortunate that Twitter will be accused of Tales being an unimaginative ’me too’ move in the wake of Facebook Stories because this is an attractive way of highlighting how Twitter (which I must admit that I’m a much bigger fan of than Facebook) can empower amazing people who would otherwise remain unheard and how their simple, open platform gives anyone with a bit of imagination a great tool to create useful (or silly i.e. @big_ben_CLOCK & @dianainheaven) information feeds. Stories from Iran and disaster areas will no doubt appear soon, as will the success stories of @shitmydadsays and @OMGfacts et al.

The use of the word tales though is interesting as it has a strong association with the city in which Twitter is based. Think of the Arctic Monkeys and their song ‘Fake Tales Of San Francisco’ and further back the writer Armistead Maupin and his ‘Tales of the city’ series of novels about Mary Ann Singleton who moves to San Francisco.

Maupin’s Tales were serialised in the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner before being turned into a 90s TV show that aired on PBS and Channel 4.

Would you submit your Twitter story? Are we obliged to call it a ‘twory’? Let us know in the comments below…