So, I’ve added one RSS feed—recent books from your or someone else’s library. You’ll find the feed in users’ profile pages, marked with the familiar icon. The feed shows the last twenty books entered, linking to the book’s catalog page. The “description” field includes the user’s review (if there is one), their tags and the books publication data.

I made one feed to test the waters, and to provoke comment. So, what else do you want? I suggest:

• A feed of someone’s recent reviews
• A feed of someone’s recent books, but restricted to a given tag
• A feed of others’ review of books owned by someone (so you can track reviews of books in your library)

What else makes sense? Also let me know if you want the format changed, for example to include different data in the “description” or restrict it to ten books.

Another suggestion: I’d rather have a single page with feed buttons and maybe a way to create just the feed you want. I’d rather not be strewing orange buttons all over. Am I a fuddy-duddy?

PS: Forum is coming.

LibraryThing users officially cataloged over a half-million books. I would be stunned if my capacity for that emotion hadn’t been destroyed at 100,000 books. One million books by Christmas or bust!

I’m still waiting for the mainstream U.S. media to notice LibraryThing. If you agree, blog us. And tell your friends and neighbors, particularly if your neighbor is David Pogue, Walter Mossberg, Xeni Jardin or Hiawatha Bray. What’s up with tech reporters and kick-ass names anyway?

In other news:

• I returned from a tech conference in Boston, so I’m on LibraryThing 24/7 again. There were a few days there when no new features were added; can’t have that!
• The forum at BookCrossing has discovered LibraryThing. If any blog readers are also Book-Crossers, I’d love to hear how you think LT and BC can work together.
• The book pile contest is still open, mostly because the prizes are all free memberships and I haven’t built that feature yet… Flickr‘s got most of them posted. Great stuff.
• LT needs a forum. I think I may do one of my Mothboards. They’re linear; I really hate threaded discussions. And I want something that doesn’t look like the inside of a spaceship. On the other hand, a simple board would preclude people having open-ended discussions about books (as opposed to LibraryThing). But aren’t there enough places for that?
• Strange LT Meme: Phantom Scribbler wrote “Do any other Library Thing users feel lonely when you see that you’re the only one who owns a favorite book?” and suggested people blog about their “onlies.” So far, only No Fancy Name has taken the bait.

Universal Import is now truly universal. It accepts both files and web pages. I’ve successfully tested it with:

• Delicious Library, Readerware, Book Collector
• Amazon (Wishlists, Listmania, past orders), Barnes and Noble, Booksense
• Bibliophil (export or URL), BookCrossing, Reader2, Listal, What Should I Read Next
• Home-brewed text files
• Mumbling ISBNs near your computer, rotary telephone or toaster

See the post below for more on how it works. Again, it won’t fetch your comments, the date you bought something or track down books without ISBNs, but it should do most of what you want most of the time. If you have problems, be specific about them. Go ahead and send me files and URLs.

Let me know if you end up drawing books from a site I haven’t mentioned. I’m keen to add it to the list.

I’ve added a “Universal Import” feature. After wrangling with a dozen or so different formats, I chucked the nonsense and made a single Swiss-army-knife import. Universal Import works on:

• Desktop applications like Delicious Library, Readerware, Book Collector, etc.
• Online services that offer exports (eg., Bibliophil)
• Home-cooked text-files, spreadsheets and databases

For each one, it grabs the ISBNs and looks them up against the libraries you specify. The upside is the data is fresh, top-quality and drawn from wherever you want—from Amazon to libraries in Turkey. The downside is that it only grabs the ISBNs. It doesn’t try to wrangle all the other stuff.

This was not done lightly. Individual filters take a long time to build and require all sorts of compromises. LibraryThing users clamoring for imports are distributed among a half-dozen applications and various home solutions. So, instead of making 5% of my users 100% happy, I decided to make 100% of my users 95% happy.

I hope you like it.

Coming tomorrow: Imports from web sites like Amazon and AllConsuming!

I’ve added the ability to upload profile pictures, not just link to one somewhere else. Go to your profile and click “Edit your profile” to do this.

If this works reasonably well, I’ll also let people upload book covers. This will be restricted to paid users to avoid porn spam. (Also added to the terms.)