Chinese version of Wattpad

Marcher has written a cool review of Wattpad in Chinese. Even cooler is the Chinese version of the Wattpad Reader, thanks Marcher! link

Countdown to Harry Potter 7

11 days to go until the release of Harry Potter Book 7 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This is very exciting for Wattpad members. We love HP and are huge HP fans. While the anticipation for the new book is high, I want to remind everyone that posting these works by J.K. Rowling is not permitted. As with all copyrighted material, do not share them on Wattpad unless you have permission from the owner, or the work is licensed to be used this way. Thanks for your cooperation!

The Digg Effect hits Wattpad

The story 33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names made it to the front page of Digg and we’re getting buried under the Digg effect! We’ll get the server back up as soon as possible.

Update: After nearly 4 hours of outage this afternoon, we’re now back online!

Wattpad for students & teachers

Rob De Lorenzo reviews Wattpad and has a few ideas on how students and teachers can use it to support their curriculum. Great ideas! It’s natural considering most students use their phones for texting already. One problem it would certainly help tackle is heavy school backpacks, this is a serious problem.

Lewis Shiner releases short fiction under CC

Writer Lewis Shiner has made a collection of his short fiction available under a Creative Commons license. You can find the collection here.

Shiner says this on his Fiction Liberation Front Manifesto:

…short fiction endures because it provides a way of introducing writers to new readers… The main reason I write these things, after all, is for people to read them.

Cory Doctorow also gives his take on this.

Woohoo! 10 Million Pages!

We passed the 10-million milestone earlier today, for pages delivered to mobile phones. This is pretty awesome since we officially launched Wattpad only two months ago!

Wattpad Survey Results

Thanks to everyone for participating in the survey, we received a total of 206 responses. Here are some results we found interesting:

• 72% of respondents use Wattpad Reader on their phone at least a few times a week. 38% of respondents use Wattpad Reader at least once a day.
• The most popular content is long fiction, with 54% of respondents reading this on Wattpad, followed by short fiction (51%) and humor/trivia (41%)
• It’s good to hear that most are happy with the service! 74% of respondents rate the reading experience as either good or very good, and a further 19% say it is adequate.

We apologize for being unable to respond to everyone individually, but here are responses to a few common comments we received.

• You can download the story to your PC (as jar file) and then load it to your phone using USB or bluetooth. When you do this, you do not incur data charges from your mobile operator. You can do this by selecting the “Read offline” option on the story web page.
• If you click the username link, it will show you other material uploaded by the same user.
• By far, the number one feature request is “more stories.” Fortunately this is one everyone can help with. As more people join the Wattpad community, more stories will be uploaded. So help spread the word: email your friends, post to forums, and mention it in your blog. Tell more people about Wattpad, your recommendations will help the community to grow.

We are now planning for our next release and this survey gave us a lot of new ideas. We’ll keep you posted through our newsletter and blog. Once again thanks so much!

Wattpad User Survey

Calling all Wattpad users! We are working hard to improve Wattpad and would like to hear from you. Tell us what you’d like to read and what new features you’d like to see.

Update: Thanks to all participants! The survey is now closed.

I Chat, Therefore I Am…

Here is an interesting story posted by phonegeek. It’s a conversation between two chatbots, both designed to simulate real human responses. The dialog is surprisingly coherent leaning heavily on existentialist thoughts.

Reading in the bath?

A survey conducted earlier this year by Japanese online community MyVoice is curious indeed. It asked its members about water-resistance in their mobile phones and how they might use it if it were water-resistant. It seems a large group of people expect to email in the rain, while reading in the bath was admittedly less popular.