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.