Lonelygirl15

That's the short version of how Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried came to be co-founders of the social entertainment company Eqal. 
 

"The conversations you have in college, we were having post-college, late into the night about the Internet, entertainment, and where it was all headed," Beckett tells Sun Media. 

 

In 2006, Beckett (who was in a plastic surgery residency program), Goodfried (the lawyer) and another friend, Ramesh Flinders, created lonelygirl15, a video-blog featuring a seemingly "real" teenage girl named Bree. 

She quickly built up a massive audience on YouTube that had no idea they were watching a scripted show, delivered by Beckett and his pals. Eventually, the secret became too hard to keep and the web community caught on, but fans decided to stick around and lonelygirl15 evolved into a hit multi-character web program. 

Interactive stories 

"From the success of lonelygirl we have just been building, and building, and building the company," Beckett said. "Our goal as a company is to enable people and organizations to tell interactive stories online." 

Eqal later worked with CBS, creating Harper's Globe, a web series companion to the TV show Harper's Island. Through their relationship with CBS, Beckett and Goodfried met Anthony E. 

Zuiker and, before long, Eqal was hired to create the web experience for Zuiker's digi-novel, Level 26. 

"They have done this before and they're kind of the creators of the genre of social community in terms of narrative," Zuiker says. 

The website for Level 26: Dark Origins launched this weekend. Besides being the home base for the motion-picture bridges that link readers from one group of chapters of the novel to the next, level26.com hopes to develop a successful online community. 

"Think of it like a book club online. It's going to be a community for people to talk about the book and then also talk about the greater Level 26 universe," Beckett says. "What if the Harry Potter books launched with an official community built around the universe and mythology, where there was the creator J.K. Rowling, and there was extra content, and the books themselves were interactive, and everyone could have profile pages, and they could come up with their own characters and write their fan fiction and create their own story lines?"

Beckett's plans for Zuiker's creepy thriller series don't end there. 

"For Book 2 and Book 3 there are going to be sections of the forum featuring recurring contests, and calls to action for people to actually create their own characters and their own storylines that might actually become a part of the second and third books."