Readme

A review of America Alone, because of a bet.

It’s taken some time. I’ve been playing with the servers, and our deployment environment, and getting other projects finished and out of the way. But now it’s safe to say that the codebase for readme has begun to grow at a reasonable rate.

The goal is to have something interesting up in a month, with the a full beta up in two 1/2 months.

Stay tuned to the project if you will, and please sign up at <a href=”http://www.readme.com”>readme.com</a> to get updates emailed to you.

Keep reading,

-The readme.com team

I recently saw a great presentation about Amazon’s Web Services. They really have some great deployment tools.

I, and most other tech people I know, thought that the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was just a place to send processes, like running algorithms etc. In reality it’s a place where you can set up virtual servers. You can take a pre-made linux image or make one yourself and then run as many as you want for $.10/hour (up to 20 at a time, until you talk to them).

I’m pretty excited to be using the EC2 for readme.com. I’m hoping for some big spikes in traffic once we launch and EC2 will handle that pretty well.

To get the site started I think we’re going to use Amazon’s product feed. I hope to bring more products into the fold and we grow, but they’re setup is so easy it’ll help us launch sooner rather than later.  Please let me know how you feel about this.

So I was playing around with the google predictive search recommender and I found “phonebook 04 zz phone book” show up as a search option. I did A little more research and found out that that search is performed a lot. Searching for it myself I didn’t find much, I’m really curious as to what people are searching for with that.

The essence of community can be found in a book club. A group of friends, or soon to be friends, gathered around discussing a shared experience. A book. There’s nothing quite like sitting face to face and talking about what happened, how the plot moved, finding out that your favorite character was the your friend’s least favorite. But getting to that point can be tough.

People seem to be getting busier and busier, but the “25 is alive” lobby still hasn’t been able to get that extra hour tacked on to the day. It’s hard enough to get a few people together at one time to talk about a book, but then you all have to choose a book. That means you have to research books to figure out which ones to to present to the group. Then, if you’ve taken the time research the book, present to the group, decide as a group which book to read, and schedule a day to meet, what if that day has to change? Now someone has to take their time to call each person and make the change. Don’t even get me started on that one friend who never checks voice mail …

This can all be easier.

Readme’s passion is to help people interact with each other about books. We can help make online interaction amazingly simple and enjoyable, but we know that face to face is the best so we plan to facilitate that as well. With the first launch, scheduled to be soon, we’ll be focusing on the user’s interaction with a book. The next focus on interacting with other people about those books.

Once we’ve got individuals talking to eachother we’ll do everything we can to help book clubs organize, discuss and choose books for their next meeting.

Book clubs will be one feature of readme.com. Excited? I know I am, heck. Stay tuned for previews of more features still to come.

The team met today, and got a lot of work done. I’m really excited about this project. More to come.

We’re currently working hard at readme to make an online community for book lovers and new authors. The first step in this process is opening up blogs to the community. Please check out our blogroll for our new authors.  If your interested in creating a blog, leave your email address and a message in the form at readme.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.