A year ago today, we flipped the switch and ficlets went live to the world. We had some hiccups out of the gate, but March 7th was the day we shoved our preening little darling on to the stage (and posted the first story). Since then, you guys have told a lot of stories, well over twenty-three thousand. You’ve sent each other over ten thousand notes, and posted over forty-five thousand comments. You’ve linked to ficlets over forty thousand times on your blogs, profiles and other places (according to technorati). Ficlets has won a W3 Award and is up for two SxSW Web Awards, been featured in a couple newspapers, and even shown up on Canadian Radio.
The numbers, awards and press are nice and fun, but I’m in love with the community, and I can’t take any credit for that. That was all you guys. We were worried when we first launched about what community would form on the site, because that’s not something anyone can control. It’s an organic thing. You can help it along with cues in the design, the voice used (we couldn’t really go wrong with Mr. Scalzi, could we?), etc, but the community just “happens” and there’s very little you can do to control it. Thankfully, I didn’t even need to worry about it. This is the best and most self-sufficient community I’ve ever seen on the web, and all the credit for that goes to you. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
I loved building ficlets with Jason, Ari, Cindy and Jenna. It was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. They’re all professionals at the top of their games, and it was an honor to work with them every day on the design, code, voice, all of it. They’ve all gone on to other things (Ari’s starting a restaurant, which I think is awesome), but they’re still very much a part of the ficlets family.
I have so many emotions and thoughts right now, I don’t even know what to say. I’ve worked on many projects that get more traffic, made more money and were more visible in the industry, but I’m most proud of this. I’m so thankful AOL let me build it and launch it. Ficlets started as an “experiment” to see if Ruby on Rails would work for building community applications. I wanted to see if a small autonomous team could actually build and launch something of quality in three months. Thankfully, my management let me steal the folks I did and go off and try it. It worked well enough that they let us launch it without ever going through the regular QA (quality assurance) process.
When we started all this last January, I figured that “success” for ficlets was getting out the door. Just going through the process of creating it was rewarding. That people actually use it and like it is more than I could have hoped.
I’m off to celebrate, much like I did last year, by going to SxSW Interactive. The Web Awards ceremeony is Sunday night. I won’t have my laptop with me, but I’ll most definitely twitter something when I know the results.
Thank you for making ficlets’ first year a success, and I hope you’ll stick around for our terrible twos.
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