By brandon.corbin on Wednesday March 10th, 2010

In a post a few weeks ago I begged my future self to not give up on my List Sharing idea, a bit.ly for Lists  - Listy.me is the result.

The first beta version is officially out in the crowd,  and I’m really happy with the result – while it’s far from perfect or complete, it’s good enough to see if people take to it.

Thanks to Amazon’s cloud technology, Listy should scale easily and will require very little technical maintenance (hopefully). Best of all, Listy has an real revenue model – unlike my products of the past – I have also worked in a few features to allow revenue sharing for Amazon Affiliates who create and share shopping Listys.

The Technology

Listy is built on a LASP Stack (Linux Apache SimpleDB PHP) and my homegrown light weight PHP framework. There’s no MySQL database,  because I have never been good at managing MySQL. In the past I  often would go overboard on all the things my product could do, purely due to how easy MySQL makes it. Instead I opted for the less flexible Amazon’s SimpleDB,  a high available, scalable, and flexible non-relational data store. As of the last few days,  I have noticed a few minutes of downtime  but the speed is great and the cost is next to nothing (for now).

Make sure to check out Listy on your smart phone, as the design morph for any device with a WebKit based browser like iPhone, Android, Palm Pre and now BlackBerry.

Finished Product

The Original Mockup

Sharing shopping lists with Listy

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← By brandon.corbin

I am Brandon Corbin, a web entrepreneur with a background in advertising and design. For over a decade I have applied my passion for user experience, marketing and software design to industries like: radio, real estate, pharmaceuticals, recruiting and eCommerce.