I mentioned a while back (holy crap, and it’s still on the front page) that Kevin Lawver was going to re-incarnate the long-lost property that AOL killed, Ficlets, into a new creation. And now that day has come.

Introducing Ficly! I haven’t had a chance to really play with it yet, but here’s some things I’ve noticed right away.

1) You can sign in by linking your account to either Google, Facebook, or even OpenID (which, in the end, stopped working on Ficlets). I linked to my Facebook account since I’ve been using that particular social network more and more these days. Will this mean that any story I create can be automatically published to my Facebook profile? That remains to be seen but would be an awesome feature.

2) There’s a special section devoted to challenges. I love that they decided to do this. Challenges were something that appeared on Ficlets where authors would post a challenge of some sort–such as “write a story that takes place following a future apolocalypse”, for example–and fellow authors could create sequels to that challenge with their themed creations. The fact that Kevin and the Ficly team included this as a standard feature shows that they really understood the Ficlets community. Challenges appeared organically as a result of the authors attempting to install their own form of ownership and comaraderie within the community. An inclusion of this feature in Ficly is a direct nod to that established community, and it’s well-deserved.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to digging into Ficly and writing some more short, short stories. I’ll probably post again with a follow-up once I’ve had a chance to see more of Ficly first-hand and check out all that it has to offer. For the moment, I’m just really excited to witness the return of Ficlets; even if it doesn’t have the same name, I already know it has the same heart.

Here’s a post from Kevin on the launch of the new Ficly.