Instant Word Search

Instant Word Search was one of the best things I did in 2007. It is a toy application and anyone can write it in a day or less. I know. But I learned a lot in the process of creating it. I will try to explain.

I was working on my startup - which was trying to empower small business with easy client management tools. I was getting nowhere. I wanted to play with Javascript and Python frameworks. I wanted a simple but interesting application. So I wrote a small application over the afternoon and called it "Instant Word Search".

Writing it was fun. I did some nifty things to make it fast. It was hosted as a CGI application. So the fastest it could get was not fast enough. 'Mechanical Turks' gave me feedback that was very eye opening. I used this need for speed situation to learn all about Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and moved the application there. There I played with lighttpd. I did lot of UI improvements based on what the real users were saying.

In the mean time, I showed the app to my friend Manikantan. I was (am) shy about showing it to anyone, as it was a very trivial app. I was really ashamed. Mani submitted it to StumbleUpon. I was shocked to get 20k visitors per day. They kept coming back too! The reviews of StumbleUpon users were heart-warming for me. These were people who I had never heard of - and they were treating IWS as best thing since diced tomatoes! The feeling cannot be expressed in words, I guess :-)

My sister and Ruchi loved the app from the beginning. But the praise of strangers gives a weird satisfaction. My sister sent the link to her friends. Ruchi found out that the site showed up in Alexa. The app got written about in an online magazine called "Web English Teacher" that goes out to teachers. Ruchi acted as my PR person.

I found out that we tend to grade our work in terms of the effort we put it, while the users tend to grade it based on how useful it is for them. Duh!

Great thing about StumbleUpon is that the recommendation is very targeted. Mani submitted it under 'linguistics', 'search', 'words'. That just worked perfect in getting really interested users. Submitting it to Reddit was an embarrassment.

I saved the best for the end: I got a B-I-G fan mail from Gail. This app happened to be something she wanted for years. She even used it at her work to show her co-workers that teaching certain prefixes to students was a waste of time. Reading her email was so much fun and satisfying. You just can't put a price tag on that. We are friends now and she has volunteered to test drive every app I write!

May be next time I'll try to be less shy about the silly things I create :-)