Fanlib.com
Apr. 20th, 2007 01:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snorkackcatcherHas anyone else received a FictionAlley Owl or other communication from a site called fanlib.com, suggesting that you go and post stories there? Does anyone know anything about them? It looked suspicious at first sight, but they do seem to be a genuine firm who have handled fan events for various big media players before (using their 'patent-pending, massively social storytelling technology that makes The L Word - A Fanisode possible' -- a phrasing that immediately triggers my bullshit detector and sets my teeth on edge, as I suspect this 'technology' is just yet another straightforward web application that may get dignified with a ridiculous patent).
As far as I can tell from this and the 'About FanLib, Inc' section in this Wall St Journal piece (scroll down), I get the impression that they're trying to set up a sort of semi-official version of FFN with tie-ins to said players? They have a set of terms and conditions that I don't imagine would stand up in court if anyone did complain about the use of their characters (FFN etc can get blind eyes turned because they're non-profit, this site I'm not so sure). And the interface pretty much sucks, with tons of graphics and embedded twiddly bits slowing things down, but a distinct lack of useful info -- like, for example, more than 50 characters of space allocated for the summary.
The way the actual fics are presented is something I have never seen done before, and I don't think it was really a good idea to do it here -- each fic is broken down into pages of about 900 words for display, so even a modest oneshot can't be read in one go. It's like those sites that split articles into tiny chunks across several pages (or used to -- happily it doesn't seem as common now) on the misreading-of-Jakob-Nielsen theory that this makes them easier to read on the web. (To adapt from Dave Langford, that's like saying that a meal is so much easier to eat when every potato is served as a separate course.)
Content of fics? From what I could see from a cursory scan, it doesn't seem to be that much different from any other archive, or to have especially good stuff. On the whole, I don't think I'll be spending a lot of time there. :)
As far as I can tell from this and the 'About FanLib, Inc' section in this Wall St Journal piece (scroll down), I get the impression that they're trying to set up a sort of semi-official version of FFN with tie-ins to said players? They have a set of terms and conditions that I don't imagine would stand up in court if anyone did complain about the use of their characters (FFN etc can get blind eyes turned because they're non-profit, this site I'm not so sure). And the interface pretty much sucks, with tons of graphics and embedded twiddly bits slowing things down, but a distinct lack of useful info -- like, for example, more than 50 characters of space allocated for the summary.
The way the actual fics are presented is something I have never seen done before, and I don't think it was really a good idea to do it here -- each fic is broken down into pages of about 900 words for display, so even a modest oneshot can't be read in one go. It's like those sites that split articles into tiny chunks across several pages (or used to -- happily it doesn't seem as common now) on the misreading-of-Jakob-Nielsen theory that this makes them easier to read on the web. (To adapt from Dave Langford, that's like saying that a meal is so much easier to eat when every potato is served as a separate course.)
Content of fics? From what I could see from a cursory scan, it doesn't seem to be that much different from any other archive, or to have especially good stuff. On the whole, I don't think I'll be spending a lot of time there. :)
