After the usual welcome post, it is time to tell you a little more about Connect Via Books and how we got to where we are.
Back in 2004 Flemming Madsen and I, Nick Swan, decided to launch a site in our spare time that would enable us to include our two passions – books and programming. The idea was to create a social networking site that book lovers could join that would allow them to:
- keep a list of books they’ve read.
- get new recommendations of books to read.
- find people who like the same books that you do and discuss them.
Reading books can be quite a lonely experience – our aim was to give book readers an avenue to make reading a more social experience.
Now you have to remember that the Internet in 2004 was quite a different place to what it is now. Twitter wasn’t around and Facebook was only just founded as a student directory. People were a lot more cautious of the details they published online about themselves than they are today. Web 2.0 was a term that had just been coined, and Ajax was just beginning to take off in a main stream kind of way. So in 2004 we released a site built on ASP.NET 1.1 that was quite clunky and ‘interesting’ to use. It got some early traction with initial registration numbers looking good, but unfortunately both Flemming and I had full time jobs we needed to do to keep the bills being paid. These jobs also developed into our own separate companies and so slowly our spare time to input into CvB ground to a halt. I guess that in 2006 to the end of 2008 no work was done on the site. A few registrations were still being made though which showed that the idea behind the site was good.
To show the idea had legs, a number of other book type social networking sites started – and with Facebook gaining huge traction and everyone happy to publish all kinds of details about themselves we often met down the pub and wondered what could have been!
There’s no point looking back, only forwards – and so in late 2008 we decided to do something about it. We figured a new design and build from the ground up would be a good start as we could implement a lot of things we had learned from the original CvB design that could be done better. Once we had replaced the original features we could get on with improving usability and working on new social features around books that book lovers would enjoy using and tell their friends all about. This was still going to be a part time project, but we figured 6 – 8 weeks (the magical developer estimate) would be all that was needed to get the new site out. A lovely design was completed and we set towards building the new site in ASP.NET MVC (a blog post later will detail information about the technology we are using).
Of course 6 – 8 weeks was a crazy estimation, having been 4 years since we built the original site we obviously forgot how much work went into it! So 5 months later on May 25th 2009 the new site was launched. The initial feature allowed you to add books to your profile, and adding friends who’s reading you’d like to follow. Since then we’ve added a whole subset of features such as adding comments to profiles, adding comments to books – and lots of other smaller improvements.
We’ve finally got round to setting this blog up which is an important step forward as it will allow us to let you know about new features on the site, and also to update you with stats about how the site is doing. Many people have the dream of building the next Facebook/Twitter etc so if you are one of these people you can hopefully learn a lot from us. We are currently doing this in a part time capacity in evenings and weekends which is the ideal way to bootstrap a new idea and site. Eventually we hope to grow the site large enough to warrant full time developers and staff – god knows we have enough features to develop and work to do to already need this :).
Each week we’ll publish information about how many visits we’ve had to the site, user registrations, and any other milestones we hit that you may find useful. Hopefully we’ll be able to get some community feedback on how we are doing and ideas on how to progress – but the main idea behind it is to help others who want to start the next big web site to take over the world!