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By Chris Meadows

litlets In the past I have written about the bite-sized story site Ficlets.com, its closure by AOL, and its potential revival by Kevin Lawver and other Ficlets.com founders in the form of Ficly.com (which also contains an archive of every Ficlets.com ficlet ever written).

Today on Twitter I learned about a new would-be heir to the Ficlets niche: Litlets.com. Like Ficly, it is still in beta, taking email addresses for notification of when it will be ready to try out. Its creator, Tony Santos, got involved in Ficlets.com only two weeks before it closed, and had not been aware of Ficly.com when he started development.

However, Kevin Lawver is actually pleased to have the competition. "I just find it funny that a site that AOL felt was a failure is generating all these ‘sequels,’" Lawver said. "The more the merrier!!"

Given that both Ficly and Litlets are still in their building stages, it is too soon to tell which one will be more successful or better-implemented. On the one hand, Ficly has the advantage of having the treasure-trove of nearly 50,000 ficlets written on ficlets.com that its writers can continue or otherwise use as inspirational material.

On the other hand, since all that content is released under a Creative Commons license, there is nothing to prevent Litlets from spidering and duplicating the material on its own site, just as Ficly spidered it from the original Ficlets.com. (And if Litlets hopes to attract the ficleting community who made Ficlets.com so popular, making it easy for them to continue their Ficlets stories where they left off should be high on Santos’s list of things to do.)

I only wonder whether this might end up fragmenting the ficleteer community, or proving inconvenient as ficleteers eventually find they have two different sites to follow. But on the other hand, at least having two Ficlet-style sites under development doubles the chances that one of them will eventually see the light of day.

 
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