schapirama

Good comments re:spam bots.

BTW, the creator can write something personal, both for the recipient, and for the friends who come to write their letters. It's a customization option in the album admin page.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks qeorge. Yes, indeed, lots of work needed on the front-end design.

Embarrassing. Thanks --I've fixed it.

Excellent comments, mnemonik. Thanks a lot.

* Performance is no doubt an issue (as you can see from everybody else's comments ;-) Will fix that asap.

* Good point about not having to re-enter name & email when writing a letter after you've just created the album. Will fix.

* Attaching links/videos is an option for a future version.

* More important than that is to support multiple time zones, so you don't have to guess what time it is in NYC! :-)

Thanks a lot for such a detailed review.

I'll certainly write to them. Thanks for the suggestion!

I originally built this as a b-day present for my wife, and she liked it so much that I decided to turn it into a public service. And I'll be happy if it's just that.

But we do have a model to generate (modest) revenue, which hopefully will cover the (again, modest) costs: At the end, when the recipient has seen all the letters, s/he can order an actual, physical book with all the text. It's printed on-demand, and we're make a bit of $$$ over what the publisher charges.

You worked there? Interesting. They're still up, right?

Our goal when we started the project was to be, in a way, the opposite of groupcard. Whereas they (and their format, and their examples, etc) encourage quick, short messages ("Happy b-day dude! 21, wow! now you can legally drink!"), we created our site for people who want to write longer, more personal, and more detailed letters. Hence the design with the scroll, the hand-written fonts, the lack of shinny images, etc.

You'd be surprised, but the average length of the letters that are being submitted is a bit over 300 WORDS...

I do like groupcard... we're just targeting a different audience/need...

Hey, thanks a lot for taking the trouble to create a JPG!

I am aware of the problem with the images (300KB each! ;-) I used png because I need the transparency, but my very first task now is to fix this problem.

Thanks

Great comments, 'there' and Jeremy. Yes, performance is poor. I mainly need to fix the background images, which are huge. It's at the very top of my ToDo list.

Thanks for the tips on Passenger. I'll take a look at it...

Your comments are much appreciated.

It would be great, yes. Our concern has been that the price of the book depends on the # of pages, and we don't know how many there will be in advance. More importantly, we don't know if enough people will write, to make a physical book worthwhile. What we're planning to do is give that option to the person who starts the book, and let them specify that the book should be printed only if it has 5/10/15/20 letters...

Thanks much for the suggestion.

Thanks for the comments, robryan. Yes, I agree with you, nothing beats a real object --that's why the idea is that the recipient of the letters can buy a real book (printed on demand) to keep all the letters. We've shipped a few, and people seem to love it!

Agreed. Technical solutions are important to enforce security, but "the human factor" is essential too.

Yes, it's true: their service is so good that one doesn't feel the need to abuse their security.

Still, they need to make sure that, for example: - you don't give your credentials to all your friends (so that they too can watch movies, without having to get their own Netflix subscription) - their content doesn't get streamed outside of the US, because that would be a violation of the license agreements that they have signed.

We studied their system to understand how they implement those security constraints, and how they manage to do it without affecting performance and user experience too much. The incentive was to learn, not to break their security.