Pretty much unnoticed from the tech blogosphere AOL shut down ficlets on Jan 15. ficlets was a nice little site where users could write stories collaboratively.
I have to admit that I didn’t pay much attention to the site myself, other than mentioning it shortly after its launch back in March, 2007. I am just not into writing stories myself, so it fell off my radar rather quickly. However the site gained a dedicated following and it is interesting to the tech crowd for at least two reasons:
- It was the first (at least, I think so) AOL property that supported OpenID as a consumer. About 40% of all accounts were OpenID accounts.
- Stories were Creative Commons licensed.
Especially the latter now helps writers to save their stories from AOL’s servers. ficlets co-creator Kevin Lawver set up a new site, ficly, where stories will be imported. The stories, the ideas and creativity of many, many people are not lost.
ficlets is a good example where users were sort of in control of their contributions to a site. When we contribute to a site or when we want to share content from one site to another it is important to have license agreements which benefit the users. Licenses are not the central topic of data portability yet, but it shows that we shouldn’t lose sight of them.
(via Simon Willison)
Tags: AOL, Creative Commons, Ficlets, Kevin Lawver, License, nice little site, OpenID
