Requiem for Ficlets.com

In March, 2007, I wrote a post about an interesting new “Web 2.0” fiction site: Ficlets.com, in which users wrote stories singly or cooperatively in 1024-byte chunks. It seemed promising, especially given that writer/web celebrities like John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton were participating. It won web awards at SXSW. People liked it.

But eventually those celebrities found other things to do with their time, and in June 2008, the site was more or less abandoned by its maintainers. Kevin Lawver left AOL, Ficlets’s parent company, and nobody replaced him in any of his administrative functions. The last blog post, on June 4th, sat there forlornly collecting dust and “monthly anniversary” comments with no follow-up. The OpenID login system stopped working altogether and was never fixed.

Yet through all that, dozens of writers continued to keep Ficlets alive, posting thousands of Ficlets—almost 49,000 in all. So it came as an unpleasant surprise on December 6th when a big red banner appeared at the top of the Ficlets homepage, accompanied by a pop-up window to make absolutely certain visitors got the point: “Ficlets is going away soon :(“

Ficlets’s Demise

A form-letter post on the utterly misnamed “AOL People Connection Blog,” a blog that Scalzi calls “The Most Depressing Blog in the World” (because it is now used primarily to announce what services AOL is shuttering), lays it out: Ficlets is shutting down as of January 15th.

Though you will be able to read and write ficlets until this date, we urge you to save your works immediately. Since each ficlet is relatively small you can do this easily by copying the text and pasting it into a plain text or Word document.

Of course, for those who have written literally hundreds of ficlets, saving them one at a time becomes an exercise in frustration—especially considering the hundreds of ficlets by other people that are part and parcel of the stories.

To help these people out, I have written a tutorial describing how ficleteers can use the open-source web spider HTTrack to download every ficlet they have ever written, along with all the prequels and sequels to their ficlets, at one time.

I have emailed Scalzi and Wheaton about it; hopefully they will post it in their blogs so that the people who learned of Ficlets from them can benefit in the eleven days remaining in Ficlets’s life.

Web Reaction

The demise of Ficlets, and of its sister sites that are also being closed down by AOL (such as web hosting site Hometown), has not gone unnoticed. Kevin Lawver, the founder of Ficlets, has some choice words to say—though he does not actually say them:

I still have a lot to say about AOL that I’ve been ignoring since I left back in June. I’m not sure I’ll ever write publicly how I feel about the company – because I’m not sure how I feel. On one hand, AOL gave me a career. […] On the other… well, let’s just say there’s a lot of “other”.

Others have noticed as well. Blogger Brendan O’Conner notes the lack of notice most of the AOL-shutdown sites received (Ficlets, with its 40 day advance notice and big banner and pop-up window, was an exception). He is also critical of AOL’s “paste-into-word” backup instructions.

Really, guys? The best you can come up with is to just copy and paste to Word? That doesn’t save formatting, that doesn’t save metadata like the contributions made by different authors and timestamps, and that certainly doesn’t help move content to another space on the Web.

He is surprised that AOL doesn’t offer export options, as with Movable Type or WordPress. Perhaps he should not be—if he had been involved in Ficlets this past year, he would have noticed that the site was essentially drifting rudderless since Lawver left in June.

In fact, the site had not even been actively developed for a year before that, even with Lawver there. It seems likely that AOL did not deem it cost-effective to assign people to create export options for a site that was already considered all but dead.

Blogger Jason Scott covers the service closures in a blog entry (also covered by Slashdot) in which he proposes an on-line version of “renters’ rights” that would protect service users from unexpected “data evictions.”

I’m saying that, like a real eviction, there should be practices in place. When you open your doors to hosting user content, you should have rules in action that, unless it’s a complete and total fire sale and you have no hope of even staying open that long, then you should be required, yes by law, […] to make the data available to customers for an extended period of time.

Requiem

As a site, Ficlets did have its problems. (Some of which could have been alleviated by more development.) As a busy site that received hundreds of posts per day in its heyday, it never really developed a workable method for making sure that new ficlets weren’t quickly buried in the rush of more ficlets. There were lists of “popular” and “active” ficlets, but getting on the lists was a crapshoot that largely relied on whether your ficlet stayed in the “Most recently posted” list long enough for enough people to see and read it.

And there were so many ficlets that many of them went without getting responses entirely. The problem was exacerbated by the way ficlets tended to get pushed off the front page by more ficlets, but paradoxically the ficleting community may just not have been large enough to support all possible tastes—the number of people who would be willing to take part in, say, a science-fiction ficlet chain about transforming robots was just too small for anyone to volunteer his time.

On the other hand, the site had a number of excellent innovations. The ficlet format itself was made for creativity. In my talk show interview with him (MP3), Lawver mentioned that the original idea for Ficlets had been for a fanfiction community, but AOL hadn’t been comfortable with the IP aspects of that. And unlike cluttered competitor Writing.com, the Ficlets interface was completely uncluttered, and it allowed infinite story branching instead of writing.com’s two-predefined- choices-only.

Another especially clever touch was the ability to search through Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos and use them for “inspiration”. This was the sort of creativity that Creative Commons was meant to engender, and seeing it in action was a thing of beauty.

From the start, I never really got the sense that AOL was very interested in Ficlets—it was essentially a hobby project by one of their employees, and they never attempted to promote it or leverage it. Though there were dozens of Ficlet authors, perhaps even hundreds, at its heyday, there could have been more if AOL had pushed the site. Perhaps that critical mass would have brought in enough ad revenue for AOL to consider it worthwhile.

If only Kevin Lawver had worked for Google, who make a habit of turning employees’ hobby projects into household words, things might have been different.

Hope for the Future?

In the blog entry by Lawver linked above, he mentions his plans to scrape all of Ficlets’s content to create a sort of “Ficlets graveyard” where people can at least go to retrieve their stories after the site is gone. But, tantalizingly, he also says, “If I have my way, there will be more news in the short fiction department in the next month or so…let’s just see how things work out.”

It doesn’t seem like a content management system that allows people to write content chains in 1024-byte chunks should be that hard to assemble. Might there be a light at the end of the tunnel for all the dedicated ficleteers who are still, even now, frantically posting their stories to the site?

I sure hope so. I have a lot of ficlets stories that aren’t finished yet myself, and it doesn’t seem right to finish them in any other way.