As so many of you have requested that you would like to see what your friends are reading on the home page of iRead (weRead). We had this feature in the first release of iRead but we had to pull this back because it was turning out to be an expensive call for our databases. Well that has been fixed as the engineers have designed a more scalable and fast solution for showing your friend activities. You will start to see many new social features in next 9 weeks.

Friend Activities on weRead (iRead)

So stay tuned…and as always let us know of any suggestions that you have.

On June 6th I had posted about iRead. Developing this facebook app has been a wonderful experience - high competition, pressure, thrill, viral growth, users shouting to get features - threatening to go away otherwise. Incredible stuff! Never in my last 5 years of professional career have I interacted this closely with my users - responding to their messages pacifying them, making them understand limitations & getting requirements & ideas for the next feature to build.

We have had a fair share of mishaps - with our production server going down & not getting rebooted for 5 hours! (yes we were running off a single server - and we had about 100 users then)
A Mysql crash, disk corruption, internet connection going off in the middle of setting up mysql replication…

Truly an exhilrating ride.

I cant thank facebook enough for providing this opportunity to application developers to try out their ideas .

I believe that facebook has now moved to a completely different league - myspace, orkut seem non-competitive.
More about facebook later. Here is a good analysis of facebook platform.

Right now, I am soaking in the fact that a few thousand users have adopted an app that I built with 1 great developer, in just a week’s time.

The ride only gets better from now on.

iRead - is an application that I built with

jyothirmayee

over the last 5 days.

Its been an incredible experience. Getting something decent & usable up in a short while, and then to see user adoption, get reviews, work on features that users request….  Absolutely fantastic experience

iRead is a simple idea. Mark your books. See what your friends are reading. Share books that you really like.
The applications beyond this are immense & we are just scratching the surface.
Ratings & tags come 1st to mind.
biggest book-o-phile’s, Most read books by your friends, users like you (based on the books you have read) …  I can go on ..

Facebook has done a wonderful thing by opening up their api & create a massive platform.
I have always believed that social networks are a platform, you need to have a lot more activity built around it except for adding a friend & messaging a friend.
Classifieds, reviews about any & everything, suggestions, lending stuff, all of these work much better in a social network.
I’ll post about Facebook - and why I believe they are onto something massive.

For now, let me spread the word about my baby - iRead
Please do try it guys, and share it with your friends on facebook.

And do send me all feedback ( good & bad )