Allow me to welcome our latest member – Sougat Garai. Sougat is helping us transform HappyWhy.com into a world-class website. He brings in his vast experience as a designer and his in-depth knowledge of the start-up scene. A week’s work already has produced superior looking pages. It is quite amazing how small touches to a page and toning down of accents creates visual appeal. Expect more UI goodness in the coming days.
Other changes include:
- Advertisements on featured magazines i.e., magazine created by us.
- Moved HappyWhy.com to Amazone EC2 to improve scalability and availability.
- Identified ‘Content Discovery’ as an area for improvement - expect to see a magazine recommendations soon.
HappyWhy generates Magazines using links posted on Facebook pages. All links are not the same. Links from video hosting sites such as websites and photo sites like Flickr get special consideration. YouTube clips and Flickr photos get their own container on HappyWhy Magazines.
To demonstrate this feature we created a magazine using photos from two talented wild-life photographers – Ajay Panachickal and Shantanu Ghosh. The ‘Birds of Maharashtra’ magazine showcases birds spotted in Maharashtra.
Here is what I did.
- Create a Facebook page
- Add links of photos from Flickr
- Login to HappyWhy.com, choose the above page and publish
How much does it take to create a website? If you want a basic host with a WordPress installation, it doesn’t cost you any more than Rs 2000 or $50. The cost of setting-up a website is negligible.
What does take effort is maintaining it and keeping it updated. If you have a Facebook page and you keep it up-to-date, we have a solution for you.
HappyWhy.com recently launched the publish page feature. This feature allows you to create a web-page from your Facebook page. I can hear you say, why do I need a Facebook page. Here are 2 good reasons.
- Facebook has about 600 million users. This is by no means the entire Internet user population. There are more than 1.5 billion Internet users (source)
- There is a big chunk of people with a Facebook account but do not login regularly.
I do not have concrete figures, but I have several friends who fall into either of the above categories.
A basic rule of any Internet business is to reach out to as many users as possible.
This is how you use the publish feature.
- Topic selection – I chose to share with my users information regarding morning ragas/melodies from North Indian classical music tradition.
- Uploading Links – I uploaded links to the Facebook page. A mix of informative articles and videos from YouTube.
- Publish – I logged into HappyWhy.com, chose the publish option and selected the page I just created.
That’s it. 10 minutes for a new webpage that can viewed by everyone on the Internet. Here is how it looks.
Hongkiat.com is a popular blog that specializes in providing tips for designers. Here is image of Hongkiat’s page on happywhy.com
Just launched the new version of HappyWhy. The first version had a small discovery widget with 7 random selections of magazines. We realized that this was not enough. HappyWhy v2 brings you a categorized magazines browse section. It didn’t take us long to discover this gem – Funny Bum Signs page (Facebook login required).
Funny Bum Signs
And here the the snapshot of the page in all its glory.
Think of all the things you did before Facebook existed. You can now do all of these things ‘inside’ Facebook. That’s how big Facebook is! Facebook’s intention of being a parallel Internet of sorts unfortunately makes it inefficient when developing specific applications. For example, Facebook does not allow users to create customizable photo galleries. Neither is it the best messaging/email application.
happywhy.com started with the following focus. We want a tool to browse and discover content through our friends. Lets examine how Facebook does this. The most common way to discover new content is via your news feed/recent feed. It came as a surprise to us when we saw that Facebook does not show you all the content posted by your friends; you only get to see a subset of the content. It also chooses the content for you. Finally, if you missed a great piece of content in your feed, it is gone forever unless you go to the page of the person who posted it. So it allows content discovering but there is lots of room for improvement.
When you login to happywhy.com, you see a discovery widget. This consists of users, your likes and likes of your friends – all packaged as magazine. View some of these magazines, you’ll be surprised how much content you have missed. We also provide a search feature that allows you to search for users and Facebook pages.
We are working on improving the discovery. I’ll leave you with a snapshot of SFMOMA’s magazine generated by happywhy.com
happywhy.com brings you magazines from Facebook. Login using your Facebook account and take a tour of our site. Discover new content through ‘likes’ of your friends. You will be surprised by the amount of content you have missed on Facebook.
happywhy.com Team
