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Ficlets is a non-commercial AOL community website dedicated to publishing and archiving ficlets, which are similar to flash fiction. It was founded on 31 October 2006 by Kevin Lawver, though it did not become fully operational until early to mid-March 2007.〔 On 6 June 2008, Lawver severed his employment from AOL and, in turn, departed as system administrator for Ficlets. No new administrator was announced to replace Lawver, leaving the respective duties for the site unmaintained. On 2 December 2008, it was announced on the People Connection Blog that Ficlets would permanently be closed as of 15 January 2009. On 6 December 2008, a banner was placed at the header of Ficlets pages that announced the closure of the site and a pop-up window was added to the main page that read “Ficlets is going away soon :(".〔 Lawver attempted to save the site to no avail, so he began a "Ficlets Graveyard" to archive all the ficlets written prior to the closing of the site. Lawver announced on 10 January 2009 that, with the help of Ficlets.com programmer Jason Garber and design team Viget Labs, a replacement site entitled Ficly.com would be launched. At the time of the announcement, the Ficly front page consisted of a logo (subtitling the format "A better, shorter story"), a statement of not being active yet, and a form to sign up an e-mail address for notification of the official launch. Lawver stated that the Ficly.com team is "slowly making progress" in constructing the site, referencing the possible launch date as "maybe by ficlets' 2nd birthday at the beginning of March". All content on ficlets.com was licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 license and viewable to any patron of the site. Users who completed the free registration process could submit their own ficlets (either completely original, inspired by a Creative Commons-licensed Flickr image, or as a prequel or sequel to another's ficlet), host a draft of a ficlet in progress which was not viewable by others, maintain a user profile, comment on and rate other's stories, contact other users via private messages, and maintain a list of favorite ficlet authors and stories. There was also a Ficlets blog wherein Lawver and science fiction author John Scalzi posted entries in an assortment of categories, including Book Tour Diaries, a Ficlets Spotlight, and interviews with published authors.〔 For registration, the site accepted OpenID and AOL/AIM screen names. == Creation == The site was created in late 2006 by AOL system architect and lead developer Kevin Lawver, who handled the back end website programming, as a repository for ficlets. The concept for the site originated with Lawver being a "frustrated writer", unable to find the time to complete a fictional work; as an alternative, he conceived ficlets — a format that allowed a work to be written in "five or ten minutes at work during lunch or () a break" and the site was to provide "inspiration" via "pictures, phrases or other stories" as well as circumventing, through the prequel or sequel option, having "to start from scratch when I had time to write".〔 The name of the site and fiction form were derived from a unison of words: fiction and chiclets, specifically the "lets" part of the later meant to indicate "a small version of". An additional four-person AOL developer team provided time and effort in the creation of the website:〔 * Jason Garber, who handled the front end website programming. * Ari Kushimoto, who assisted with the user interface design and programming.〔 * Cindy Li, who assisted with the user interface design and programming as well as aiding in the promotion of the site.〔 * Jenna Marino, who handled the website and logo design.〔 Science fiction author John Scalzi was a principal contributor to the site from its launch as a blogger, though he departed that position at the end of 2007. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ficlets」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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