It’s not done, but I nagged Jason enough so we’ve launched it anyway!! I present to you, my dear readers… Ficly. There’s a long story to tell about how any why Ficly came to be and why we couldn’t leave well enough alone. I might as well tell it.\
Building ficlets, for both Jason and me, was the best experience of our professional lives (he told me that, anyway, and I believe him). We had total freedom to do the right thing, which is rare, especially at AOL. We, along with Ari, Cindy and Jenna, built something beautiful. And then, it all sort of went weird. Everyone eventually left AOL, and I was left alone to keep the site kind of up and running even though I’d been told I wasn’t allowed to work on it anymore. Then, I left AOL last summer to go work at Music Intelligence Solutions on stuff I’d never done before.\
In December, AOL announced that ficlets would be shut down. I went and created the ficlets memorial, because it would be criminal to let all those stories just disappear. A bunch of valiant souls still inside AOL battled hard to get the company to either give me ficlets outright or donate it to a non-profit – it obviously didn’t happen. Jason and I e-mailed back and forth a few times about how sad it was to see ficlets die and that we really should do something about it. But, who’s got the time?\
It was Jason who pushed until I agreed. Jason got Tom Osborne and Owen Shifflett from Viget Labs to jump in and save the day (because you really don’t want me designing anything). They designed what you see on the site, and it’s more than I could have hoped. Our pal Joe helped out when he could, and I worked a couple hours at night during the week and a few hours on weekends when I wasn’t working late at the office. Five months later, and several helping hands later, here we are.\
I’m extremely happy with how it’s turned out, and with the reaction from the community so far. We wouldn’t have built Ficly if the ficlets community wasn’t so great. We did it for them, and because we have a lot of fun working together – even when it’s over e-mail.\
I don’t think of Ficly as a “side” project and we’re certainly not a startup. Ficly is an art project. We built it out of love – and a passion for fostering creativity. I think Jason put it best in an e-mail, “My job isn’t building web pages. It’s delivering happiness by the kilobyte.”\
I don’t know where Ficly goes from here. I know I have a laundry list of stuff I wanted to do on ficlets that we’ll probably get around to eventually. For now, it feels good to have done what we’ve done so far. It was hard making time for it, but I’m glad we did.
Category: development
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Ficly
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Building a Tribe in Savannah
Since we moved to Savannah, I’ve been trying to find the time to start up a Refresh group here (you know, like RefreshDC). Well, I took a little time out at work today, and here we are: Refresh Savannah!\
It’s very minimalist right now, and I still need to pick a date that will work and a venue, but it’s a start. And a start is good enough for now.\
If you’re a web person (developer, designer, project manager, whatever), you live in or near Savannah and you’re looking for peers to hang out with and learn from… please get involved. It’ll be very informal and should be a lot of fun (and only happens once a month). -
My Slides from Future of Social Media
I finished speaking at *The Future of Social Media”… it was fun telling them not to join twitter if they’re just going to be marketers and not actually be human. I told them other stuff too, I think.\
I didn’t have a lot of time to talk about the future, so I didn’t get to talk about identity vs. persona and my three categories of social networks… maybe next time. I’m pretty sure I scared the hell out of them when I talked about reputation stuff.\
Some things I mentioned that either I didn’t put the URL for in the slides or didn’t have in the slides at all:- The quote from Jeremy Tanner about twitter spammers comes from his fantastic blog post – read the whole thing.
- You can read The Cluetrain Manifesto online for free.
- I talked a little bit about Seth Godin. His blog may be a little pat, but I’ve learned a lot about marketing and product development from his books.
- My interest in reputation started with Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom. It introduces the idea of “whuffie” which captured my imagination. I hope to some day implement a real whuffie system online. I came really close once.\
I think that’s it… hopefully the people who saw it enjoyed it and got something out of it. It was a lot of fun preparing it.
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Someone Doesn’t Like the Name “Ficly”
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(the ficlets bit starts about halfway through)\
Well yeah, when you say it that way. Seriously, I think stories will still be called “ficlets” because calling them anything else would sound silly.\
In other news, Jeremy Kieth and Simon Willison both posted about ficlets’ use of Creative Commons. Why did we do it? Well, I wanted to use flickr’s CC-licensed photos and I thought it would be only fair (and possibly required by the license on the photo) if we also licensed the stories under CC. It also fit with the whole concept of the site. Every sequel and prequel is a work inspired by the original, so we might as well allow the inspiration to expand beyond the “walls” of ficlets. It didn’t really develop that way, but it could have. My favorite by-product of the discussion with the lawyers about using CC was that it ended up meaning we didn’t really need any other user agreements. By agreeing to post under CC, you free up anyone to use the stories pretty much however you want. I didn’t think I would be one of those using them, but here I am… -
The Ficlets Memorial
Finished and installed just in time, the ficlets memorial is up and running. It’s on my Dreamhost account, so it’s not going to be super speedy, but I’ve cached as much as I can, so it shouldn’t be too slow.\
I’m not entirely happy with it, but I didn’t have time to do much other than make sure I had all the data and that it’s navigable. Thanks to Alexander Grässer, I was able to get all the mature stories as well and now have a full archive of the site from last weekend. The stories should be up-to-date as of this morning, and I’ll do another update tonight before ficlets gets shut down for good.\
I have more plans for the data, and the design, but they’ll have to wait.\
Update: Someone asked if they’ll be able to “take ownership” of the stories in the memorial. Since I don’t have any user data (like how you logged in, your AIM screen name or OpenID), I can’t confirm that the person trying to claim the stories is the original author. AOL won’t budge on giving me the database, and I’m tired of asking. As for how the original ficlets will be included in ficly, I don’t know yet. I’m hoping to at least let people use them as inspiration, but I’m not sure how that will work.\
If someone wants to get the stories and do something else with them, I’d be happy to share the data. I’m planning on creating several sharable versions of the data at some point, but I just don’t have the time right now. The best I can do is a MySQL dump (which won’t help any “normal” people). I’ve never tried creating PDF’s in Rails, so I’ll probably play with generating those from the stories (mostly because I’m curious how many pages The Big Book of Ficlets would be), but that will have to wait. -
Ficly: Live After Ficlets
Like a phoenix from the ashes, something new is in the process of being born. I give you ficly. It’s not much now, but we’re working on it in our spare time. Jason (he was the driving force that brought everything together) has been pushing things forward while my job’s been crazy and while I recover from my epic sinus infection. He got the awesome folks at Viget Labs to help us out with the visual design, which you can get a taste of on the landing page. Right now, all you can do is sign up to be notified when we launch… and that’s about it. But, we’re slowly making progress and I hope to have something for real up in the next couple months (maybe by ficlets’ 2nd birthday at the beginning of March).\
Why do this when I have a full-time job (a more than full-time job, really)? I need a hobby, and I feel a responsibility to the ficlets community. If AOL’s going to abandon them, I’m not. Nothing made me angrier in my last couple years at AOL than when the company shut down products without giving the communities that loved them a place to go. I never quite understood how the company could repeatedly stab their users in the back and then expect them to remain loyal to the brand. And now that it’s happening to my users, well, there’s something I can do… so I am. First, I’m working on a “memorial” to ficlets that will preserve all the stories and keep them pretty much as they are now. That’s pretty much done, I just need to clean a few things up and get it installed in production and it’ll be ready to go. I plan on launching it on the 16th, the day after ficlets shuts down.\
Ficly may take a while to get done. It’s strictly a part-time thing for all of us. But, I’m not done exploring short fiction and community. I never got to “finish” with ficlets (that’s a story I’ll also probably never tell), and there are some experiments I want to try that I’ll never get to do working with music technology (my day job).\
I hope you’ll come along for the ride. We’ve got some fun stuff planned. -
Secret Fantasy Revealed!
Ever since Wil Wheaton (yes, that Wil Wheaton) blogged about being a fan of Ficlets, a site that Kevin helped create, I have been harboring a secret fantasy that someday Kevin and I would be at some geeky, computer conference-thingie and we’d run into Wil Wheaton, who would be all, “Kevin, my good man! Glad to finally meet you. Love Ficlets. We must do dinner tonight!” and then, I would GET TO HAVE DINNER WITH WIL WHEATON. How awesome would that be? []{.Batman! .sentence, .run-on .Holy}\
I met Wil Wheaton once. I was a teenager, living in Tucson. I bet you can guess how I met him. Yep, Star Trek Convention! My best friend, Elizabeth, talked me into going because there was nothing to do on a Saturday if the Wildcats weren’t playing basketball. We ran into a fellow classmate and OMG, how embarrassing was that? Wil talked for a bit and some fans gave him some Dr Pepper (I’ve always known we’d be great dinner companions!) and he told some funny stories. Then it was time for autographs and embarrassing things came out of my mouth. True story. I ended up with a signed, glossy 8×10 of The Next Generation cast though, so. After we each received our autographs (embarrassing things didn’t come out of Elizabeth’s mouth, damn it), we went left to some deserted area of the convention hall to kill time before her mom came to pick us up (that is how young we were!). A little while later, Wil ended up there so we got to chat some more. Thinking we’d wasted enough time in that section of the hall, Elizabeth and I wandered to the left and ended up seeing Wil again. As he went in to and then out of the men’s room. At this point, the conversation was a little awkward, heh. I swear we weren’t following him.\
So, yeah. That is my story. I went to one conference with Kevin, but Wil wasn’t there. I can’t say I was too bummed though BECAUSE I WAS TOO BUSY EXPLORING PARIS.\
Tell me your school-era famous crushes and/or secret fantasies, internet! -
Save Your Ficlets!
I’ll have the graveyard up and running by the 15th, but if you want to save your ficlets (which I highly recommend since I’m not getting mature stories and can’t get your drafts), you should follow Chris Meadows’ great tutorial.\
And, if you want to be sure your stories are saved in the graveyard, I wouldn’t right anything after 5PM on the 14th, just in case.\
Also, if you want to get really angry at AOL, go read Wil Wheaton’s great eulogy for ficlets (yes, that Wil Wheaton). I know why AOL won’t turn it over, but I still don’t understand it. But, whatever, onwards and upwards, right? -
Ficlets Est Mort
It was announced on AOL’s People Connection blog today, that ficlets will shut down for good on 1/15. I’ve known for a couple weeks that this was coming, thanks to some advance warning from friends still there. Here’s the comment I posted on that entry:
I knew this was coming, I just didn’t know the day. I tried, with the help of some great people, to get AOL to donate ficlets to a non-profit, with no luck. I asked them just to give it to me outright since I invented it and built it with the help of some spectacular developers and designers. All of this has gone nowhere.\
I’ve already written an exporter and have all the stories (the ones not marked “mature” anyway). I have pretty much all of the author bios too. Since I was smart enough to insist that AOL license all the content under Creative Commons, I’ll be launching a “ficlets graveyard” on 1/16 so at least the stories that people worked so hard one will live on.\
I have mixed feelings about ficlets’ demise. On the one hand, I’m proud of the work we did on it. I’m thankful that AOL allowed me to build it with a truly amazing group of talented folks. I’m humbled by the community that ficlets attracted and the awards that ficlets won.\
On the other hand, I’m sad that I wasn’t allowed to keep working on ficlets. I’m disappointed that AOL’s turned its back on the community, although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.\
So, to all the ficleteers out there – your stories will live on, and there may be a couple more surprises in the works before 1/16 if I have my way. Be on the lookout… I’ll post any news to my blog.I’ll do my best to keep up with the stories as they’re posted so none get lost. If your story is marked “mature”, I haven’t figured out how to crawl it yet. I also haven’t gotten stories’ tags yet, but I have gotten all the author bios and have preserved the prequels and sequels as best I can. I have a little Rails app already done to display everything, and will be providing a downloadable feed of all the stories I’ve scraped so anyone’s free to re-purpose the stories for their own mashups.\
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. I started there in tech support as a 20 year-old kid who had no idea what he wanted to do. I left as a 33 year-old System Architect, leaving to go run a team of developers and build really cool web apps all about music (that we’ll be launching soon). On the other… well, let’s just say there’s a lot of “other”.\
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.\
Also, I should have known the ficlets community would do something so kickass it makes me cry… check these out:- Save Ficlets!
- What We Should Do About Ficlets Leaving
- Sticking Together
- Goodbye to Ficlets
- Ficlets! I’m So Upset Right Now!
- Ficlets Memoir Challenge
- Keeping Ficlets in Our Memories\
The thing that surprised me the most about ficlets was the community that formed there. It’s the most tight-knit, supportive and fun groups of folks on the internet I’ve ever seen, and I’m humbled that they chose to hang out with ficlets, and love the site so much.
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Comments Are Unbroken
A lovely change in Movable Type caused comments to be sorta really broken for the past week or so. I just now got around to fixing things… so if you tried to post a comment in the past 8, 9 or 10 days and it didn’t work – and you still remember what it was – go ahead and try posting it again! Let’s see if it works…