An Interview with Herryanto Siatono, the web 2.0 innovator behind BookJetty.com

Do you read often? Do you usually keep track of what books you have read and share with your friends what you have read? If you have a headache about keeping a list of books, BookJetty.com is the ideal web 2.0 solution for you. SG Entrepreneurs has the honour of interviewing Herryanto Siatono (Pluit Solutions), the web 2.0 innovator behind the site, who shares with us his experiences from building BookJetty in his spare time, the interesting features behind his invention and finally his thoughts on web 2.0.

SGE: Hi Herryanto, tell us about your background and your current work.

Herryanto Siatono: I am a web developer/designer, founder of Pluit Solutions, was six years into Java web development scene, but converted to Ruby on Rails (RoR) about a year ago. Currently working on a RoR project for Exploit Technologies Pte Ltd, the marketing and commercialisation arm of A*STAR.

SGE: What inspired you to be an innovator, specifically, what made you start the BookJetty.com project?
Herryanto Siatono: Early last year in January, I just finished reading an AJAX in Action book, thus I was looking for a pet project to get my hands dirty. And intuitively, the idea of BookJetty fits perfectly using the Ajax mechanism, where asynchronous requests can be silently triggered by the browser to query the book availability in the library. When it worked, I thought it’s pretty cool, and why not share it with others; as it really saves a lot of my time swapping to and fro between Amazon and NLB online catalogue sites.SGE: What are the major obstacles when you started building Bookjetty.com ?
Herryanto Siatono: The hardest part is the connection to National Library Board (NLB) online catalogue site, because it does not have an external web service API like Amazon.com. Thus a more primitive pain-staking process using screen scrapping has to be used. To make it even harder, the site needs a unique internal session to initiate each search, thus I had to hack out a way to retrieve the session ID; and not to flood NLB server with redundant sessions and to save on session creation time, I had to pool the session IDs and share them with all BookJetty users. Those processes almost caused me to abandon the project, but somehow the pieces of codes started to form and make wonder.

SGE: What are the interesting features in BookJetty.com which you like to share with us?
Herryanto Siatono: The ability the query NLB catalogue information on the fly is a big time saver. And the new feature to bookmark your books with self-defined categories or tags comes in handy too; on and off you will surely bump into good books that you want to read, now can bookmark them, and refer to the list later.

By bookmarking your books, indirectly you are able to filter out popular books which probably worth a read too and also find friends who are interested in the same book. Along the way, new features will be continuously added, coming up next will be the widget to embed in your blog to show the list of books you have bookmarked.

SGE: What are the interesting lessons you learn from coming up with the site? How did you get the word out to people using it?
Herryanto Siatono: Here are the lessons I have learned:

• Use the right tool and know your tool well, this will help to save a lot of your time.
• Develop fast and release early, get feedback from users early, you don’t want to build a gigantic application that none wants to use.

For marketing, initially I posted in online forums, but the response was limited as forum posts got buried easily with the flood of new posts. But later, thanks to some good people who blogged about BookJetty. When someone blogs, it helps to bring new traffic to the site, and the biggest help is when it was featured in Lianhe Zaobao.

SGE: Do you have interesting encounters with the users who adopted your technologies?
Herryanto Siatono: Mainly I just got an acknowledgement from strangers, but are BookJetty users, saying hi and asked me to keep up the good work. And once, two founders of a local software house who bumped into BookJetty and invited me to pay a visit to their new office. They appreciated the efforts I put into designing BookJetty user interface, we had a good chat, they gave me some words of encouragement too and a copy of the software that they developed, which were really nice gestures I think. I was delighted and touched by their sincerity.

SGE: What are your thoughts on Web 2.0? Do you think that it can take off in Singapore, or that matter, Asia?
Herryanto Siatono: I think Web 2.0 brings a new excitement to the web industry, which we seriously need after the dot.com crash, as people started to be creative again, be adventurous, trying out new ideas and having new hopes. And it is great seeing people around the world working hard again, pushing beyond the boundary what we can do with the web.

For web 2.0 in Singapore and Asia, apart of me think we can, after all it is Web 2.0, the new wave, and the world is flat, geography boundary should not be an excuse anymore; yet another part of me think we need to work a lot more harder.

Related Links:
“If you want to know what I read” by BL

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