Ficly: AOL's Fiction Community Gets a New Face

Written by Dana Oshiro / June 1, 2009 6:35 PM / 9 Comments

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Need to get the creative juices flowing? Put down the peyote and pick up your laptop. Ficly is a collaborative writing community where members can buck their writer's block and contribute to shared works of fiction. Armed with 1,024 characters, Ficly users issue story challenges, start new story stubs and add sequels and prequels to existing stories. It's a grade school English exercise without the bullies.

After AOL shut down 18-month-old CC-licensed Ficlets in January 2009, developers Jason Garber and Kevin Lawver vowed to rescue the service's ~~4500~~ 45,000 stories. They even built a memorial site to mourn the loss of their project. Resurrected as Ficly, the developers reconvened and joined forces with some fantastic designers to launch a truly beautiful and well-intentioned service.

Ficly's first blog post reads:

Tell us your story. Remind us what it means to be a part of the larger human family once again. Let us create, let us be, let us nurture a society. A society of storytellers.

With a call-to-action like this, how can it not lure a community of creative altruists? Budding writers can register to contribute at ficly.com.

Thanks to Kristin Nienhuis for the tip.

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Comments

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Thanks for the writeup! Just a couple minor corrections... The ficlets memorial has almost 45,000 stories in it, not 4,500, and AOL shut ficlets down in January of this year - it launched in March of 2006.

Ficly was built because Jason and I couldn't stomach letting the fantastic community that had formed around ficlets just disappear. They made ficlets what it was, despite the frequent errors, lack of bug fixes or new features, and eventual shuttering of the site. The guys at Viget Labs did a great job on the design, and Jason and I were thrilled to build it and bring the ideas that started on ficlets back - and build on them - so the community could continue to grow and develop.

Posted by: Kevin Lawver | June 1, 2009 8:13 PM

"Wow. Sorry about that Kevin. I've made the corrections. Thanks."

Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | June 1, 2009 8:29 PM

Wow. Sorry about that Kevin. I've made the corrections. Thanks.

Posted by: Dana | June 1, 2009 8:29 PM

great article

Posted by: Free Freebies | June 2, 2009 1:30 AM

thx for this article.

Posted by: tom | June 2, 2009 4:10 AM

does ficly pay money to authors, like the newer writing sites do? (storymash.com and webbook.com come to mind, both pay 50% royalties)

Posted by: Chris | June 2, 2009 5:05 AM

Pumped that this project has been resurrected. It's something that those guys have been working on a for a while. Definitely a labor of love.

Posted by: Justin | June 2, 2009 7:25 AM