Ficlets

» see ficlets.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The years Ficlets was open, late 2006 to the start of 2009, are years I was thoroughly online for. I was also writing precisely nothing in English that anyone would call fiction. English-language creative writing communities were a room I could see into from the hallway and had no reason to walk into, and this one closed before I ever found it.

Kevin Lawver was a system architect at AOL, and Ficlets was the thing he got the company to let him build. It opened on 31 October 2006 and was running properly by the following March, with four other people on it doing front-end work and design. The name was fiction crossed with Chiclets, which tells you the register it was going for.

The rule that made it work was a size limit, and the limit was specified in bytes rather than words. A story had to be at least 64 bytes and could not exceed 1,024. Nobody outside software measures prose that way. It is the sort of constraint that gets chosen by someone who thinks in field widths, and it turned out to be a better writing prompt than any theme could manage, because a byte ceiling is not negotiable and does not care what you were trying to say.

The second rule was that no story was finished. Anyone could attach a prequel or a sequel to anything already posted, which meant a piece you wrote on a Tuesday could have three different endings by Friday, none of them yours. Everything went up under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5, a decision made at launch that mattered enormously later. By January 2009 the site held around 49,000 stories and over 10,000 registered members. John Scalzi wrote on it. So did Wil Wheaton.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

Lawver left AOL on 6 June 2008 and nobody replaced him. That is the whole failure, and it is a common one for anything built inside a large company by a person who cared about it more than the org chart did. The site kept serving and kept accepting stories. There was simply no one left whose job it was.

The timing was bad in a wider way too. AOL in 2008 was shedding user-generated properties at speed, closing Hometown that October and clearing out most of what remained of its personal-web era. A small fiction site with no owner and no revenue was never going to survive that review.

~ the day it died ~

AOL posted the notice on 2 December 2008. Ficlets would close permanently on 15 January 2009. Six weeks is more warning than most shutdowns of that period gave, and in this case the warning was actually useful, because the license meant the community could copy everything without asking permission from anyone.

They did. The archive was pulled down and mirrored, and Lawver put up a static Ficlets Graveyard holding the Creative Commons stories. A shutdown where the corpus walks out intact is rare enough to be worth marking. Most of the sites that died in the same window took their contents with them, and the choice of license at launch, made years before anyone was thinking about an ending, is the only reason this one did not.

~ what replaced it ~

On 10 January 2009, five days before the lights went out, Lawver announced a replacement. Ficly was built with Jason Garber, who had done the front end on the original, and a design donated by Viget Labs. It took about four months of spare evenings and it launched later that year, doing the same thing without a corporation attached.

It lasted longer than the original did. Lawver announced its end on 17 August 2014, saying he was tired of feeling guilty about a site he no longer had time for and that the codebase was old enough to need a rewrite. Within a day of that post somebody had started building the next one. Ficlatté picked the idea up from there, three names deep from a thing AOL closed for costing too little to notice.

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