I’vRead launched

Akky’s yonda4 has a sensational debut last couple of months in Japan. “Yonda” means “I have read” in Japanese. If you are not familiar with Japanese, you have no idea why there is “4″, but in Japanese “4″ can be pronounced as “yo”, so literally, it is “yondayo”. Actually “yonda” and “yondayo” is a quite same meaning, but latter is more friendly and it has meaning to tell people. You are not saying to yourself, but to tell somebody.

Since yonda4 has launched successfully, akky was thinking for English version of yonda4. Yep, it is ivread, and has just launched a few days ago! Actually, I also helped this project. Since we launched narabe / narabete 2 years ago, we have developed web applications with symfony. Yes, both yonda4 and ivread are developed with symfony framework.

So, akky asked me for help to i18n of yonda4 last week, and setting up the environment. At that time, I was working on his other projects, but I thought ivread is a good challenge, and I also liked his idea. Since I’m using symfony in last two years, it didn’t take any time to join this project. I was just ready. Again, I’m happy with symfony for easy development and its i18n support.

So, I helped set up product environment in ec2, and automatically backup feature for s3 storage. Yep, we are using ec2 now to start new service. I like these services, it is easy to set up environment, and once you set it up, you can store private AMI to your s3 storage. So, we use s3 for back up for both AMI and database dump. Some might says ec2 is too expensive, but you can pay per hour. I hope it won’t happen, but if service you are running on ec2 did not work well, you can always stop the server. Just after you stopped, you are not going to be changed.

We’re still working on ivread to parse tweet. There are some rule to follow in usage page, but it seems that not many people read it, and tweet whatever they like. So, we will try to cover as much as we can.

BTW, in this weekend, symfony’s core developer, Fabien is coming to Tokyo!!!! I live at Kyoto where is a bit far from Tokyo. BUT, I’m going to see him in Tokyo this weekend.

All right, tech part is done. The reason I like about ivread is not only symfony base application and I could use ec2. I liked akky’s idea very much. Both ivread and yonda4 provide users the way to affiliate their books. I do not like ads most of time, because it does not relate with the contents in many cases. I like ads when you really recommend it. At least for me, I do not want any ads for products or services I have never used. If I have used it, and liked it, then I would be happy to add ads of them. So, ivread is real users’ voice. You can add a short comment with tweeting to ivread as well.

As I mentioned above, and Cool Cat Teacher Blog mentioned, if you tweet their amazon affiliate id to ivread, you have chances to get some cash back. I think this motivates people to tweets to ivread. Akky also said Twitter can be platform for our life. I strongly agree with his idea.

Well, we are still on the way to make ivread better, but I believe ivread has a bright future!