Archive for the ‘email’ Category

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

New Feature: Find Friends

We’ve added a feature that makes it easy to connect to people you know.

These include people who may be using the site already, but you don’t know their user name, and people you want to invite to the site. It can use contacts from your current email system, or manual entry.

Check out Find Friends, from your profile or here.

An excess of caution. Automatic email systems like this have come under much criticism, including my own. After the nastiness that has hit other companies’ efforts, we’ve taken every precaution to avoid mess ups with our system.

The protections are quite extensive:

  1. Members can only be found if they want to. We added the checkbox for that a few weeks ago. All older members were set to “false,” unless they already had their email publically shown on their profile.
  2. No emails or other data are stored by us.
  3. Emails are only sent once, and can’t be resent by you either.*
  4. When your list of contacts comes back NONE are pre-checked. (The sites that helpfully pre-check 1,000 names are really flirting with disaster.)
  5. We have removed any option to check all contacts, so you can’t even do it by mistake. But we kept the option to un-check all contacts. If you do that by mistake, okay.
  6. Instead of misleading you about what will happen in one direction, we slightly mislead you in the other. That is, the button marked “invite selected contacts” (above) does not actually go ahead and send the emails. Rather it shows you the invite list one last time and asks you to reconfirm the list.

We are confident these steps together make LibraryThing’s invite feature the most conscientious of its kind.


*To know whether you’ve emailed someone already we do store a “hash” of the email, a mathematical derivative of it that can’t be used to reconstruct the original.

Labels: email, invitations, new feature, new features

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

Why I don’t work for a big organization

Tweet from a librarian I know:

“It amazes me that organizations skimp on the cheap stuff (disk space) and expect us to use our labor hours to tweeze through our inboxes.”

I remember this was true at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston publisher where I worked. HM’s installation of Lotus Notes gave us each only so much space. As the guy responsible for pulling together their ebooks*, my inbox was full of large files. I was perpetually up to my chin in water.

But this was six years ago, back when, although you knew what terabyte was, it sounded as far off as terraforming Mars or, say, a petabyte. That six years of Moore’s law and the ready example of Gmail has smart, valuable people like picking through messages in her inbox to save space depresses to me no end.

Maybe I’m just touchy, but I have decided to NEVER suffer this kind of thing again. Because it’s never just one thing, but a whole set of interlocking inflexibilities and ineptitudes that sap the spirit and undermine contentment and productivity. So I hope that LibraryThing has given me enough professional mojo that, even if it fails, I can choose to never again do computer work for an organization that doesn’t understand computers.

*It looks like they’re still using most of my code. It was cool in, um, 2001, anyway.

Labels: email, houghton mifflin

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

Add a dynamic signature line to your email

Wouldn’t it be neat to tell the people you email with what you’re reading now? I saw this on emails from friends over at AbeBooks, and thought it would be cool to have it done dynamically, and from LibraryThing data.

Email clients don’t allow scripts or for example RSS feeds, so I created a way to do it, based on images that many (but not all) email clients allow you to include in your signature.

Here’s what I’m talking about, with the signature line called out in yellow:

To play with the feature, click here. (You have to be logged in.)

Some notes:

  • This feature will get a lot more useful when we have a proper “currently reading” collection feature (coming soon). You pretty much have to use tags now.
  • No complaining about “fluff” features, please. Chris Gann first made this feature almost a year ago. I dusted it off and hacked together a user interface. It didn’t distract us from making your favorite feature.
  • We need your help! We’re going to need to come up with directions for adding this to different email clients. Some just won’t allow it. I’ve started a thread for discussing this.

Labels: email, new feature, new features