Genesis of Jokeshive.com

I intend to keep this as a technical blog, blogging my experiences as I develop http://www.jokeshive.com. Intention is to help me remember some of the implementations in future (I have one of the worst possible memories in the world) and hopefully some of the fellow developers would be benefited through the inputs and findings that I share here. However, before I delve into the details of technical implementation, I would like to give a little brief about what got me started and what motivated me to get going.
I guess it all got started when my friend Subrata and my brother in law Abhisekda started sending jokes over sms. I realized how much more enjoyable my days had become while I kept reading those jokes. There were occasions when I got up in the middle of the night and looked for a new joke. I did one more thing to have my supply lines keep going. I started forwarding jokes from one to other, after all it works as a barter system:).

Patterns that I noticed -

I like jokes and so do others
SMSs gives a very quick and easy access .
It survives on the basis of forwarding the jokes to each other.
Typically you forward the jokes you like most and so do your friends.
Friends share similar tastes. ( too obvious to observe ;))
Hence average quality is much better.
I need more such friends who can share more jokes of their choice.

If we add the dots and do a bit of extrapolation in this age of Facebook what does that tell us? A Social Network dedicated to Jokes. Is it not too obvious? Yes it is.

But Facebook did not come natural to me either. I started looking into Facebook seriously through its APIs first (what an Irony) when my friend Arindam sought some technical help & gradually fell in love with "Facebook". Till that point I was rather sarcastic about all these hoopla around social network.

17-March-2011 I registered my app with google appengine, created the first app from the examples which finally became jokeshive.com. In fact, I continue to maintain the name of the ecplise project as "Guestbook".

So that's all about how Jokes Hive was born.