What the world needs now…

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.

“What the World Needs Now Is Love” lyrics by Hal David.

Lovahs.com is a side project we started a while back. It came about when Trish, Jon and I were talking about building things that people could really sink their hearts and souls into. Call it social media. Call it user generated content. So much talk of that these days. So much of it to take seriously; or not. We wanted to contribute something light-hearted, fun, useful, and lasting. What better subject than love? Specifically, love letters on demand.

We’re going to have fun with it. We hope you do too. But first, some background.

Lovahs.com was built originally by Gina Trapani, designed by Patricia Forest. We had contributions to it from Adam Bronte and Jon Cianciullo. Jon Gallagher is managing the system. It was built voluntarily and as such we don’t really have any ambitions to make it a for-profit venture. The worlds needs love, after all. Enjoy!

Read, Write, Code

What separates Lovahs from any other project we’ve done (and from any other social media site for that matter) is that we’ve made the code open source as well. Which is to say, we don’t just want people to come to the site to read love letters, we want them to share them. We don’t just want people so share them, we want them to write them. And we don’t just want people to write letters, we want them to write and share our code on which the site is running. We’re taking social media to the next level. Or not. Who knows what comes of our effort to get others involved. But the experiment is worth trying.

Love in all its forms

Lovahs.com is really designed as minimally as possible. It allows people to peruse the site, read letters and send them to others. If you want to contribute a letter or make comments on a letter you can – just sign up and those features will be available to you.

We purposefully left out many features (some of which we put on our wishlist). We wanted to launch with the simplest possible product and then see where the community takes it.

Some samples

Last but not least. Here are some sample letters right from the site. Please share freely!