Before getting into the SharePoint world a friend and I started a web site around 2004 called Connect Via Books. The aim of the site was simple – a social networking site for people who loved books. The original site was developed on ASP.NET 1.1 and although the original launch was quite promising after a little while we got distracted by other work (SharePoint for me!) and the site remained as it was.
Well I’m very happy to announce that the site has recently been relaunched after a large redevelopment! We learnt an awful lot from developing the first version both on a technical basis and also how people want to use a social networking site. Things have certainly changed since 2004 as well with Facebook coming along and peoples attitudes to sharing personal details on the web being a lot different.
As you’ll know from reading this blog I absolutely love reading books, so combining a development project and books was the thing that first attracted me back in 2004 and still excites me to work on it again now. Being able to connect with people who’ve read the same types of books find new recommendations is something I find really valuable and fun.
We’ve completely rebuilt the site on ASP.NET MVC which was good as it was a new thing to learn. I’m a programmer at heart and it was great fun learning this new framework. Next project perhaps I’ll try Ruby on Rails! :-)
Please register and try it out – we have a UserVoice feedback tab on the site so please leave any feedback or ideas you may have:
www.connectviabooks.com