Archive for the ‘ocelot’ Category

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Harry Potter Review Contest: 50 winners

It’s almost 12:01 here. Any moment now, the first copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will come available, and LibraryThing members across the US will start reading. (Some other parts of the world have already begun.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the first reviews were posted by noon tomorrow. Sounds like a good excuse for a contest, right?

We already have a Harry Potter Book Pile photo contest (one entry shown on the right). Well, how about a review contest too? The deal:

  • Five reviewers get a $50 gift certificate to Amazon, Abebooks, Booksense or any independent bookseller.
  • Fifty get a free membership (for them or as a gift), a handy CueCat barcode scanner, for entering more of their books, and eternal glory.
  • We end it Monday, August 6.

LibraryThing is a gloriously supportive community. So we’re going to do it a little differently:

  • We’re going to use the new review-rating feature.

    Liam Weasley, with Scabbers

    As many know, this only allows “thumbs-up” ratings.

  • The five reviews with the most thumbs-ups will win the bigger prize.
  • The rest will be randomly picked from all members who both wrote a review and voted for others’ reviews.

That is, we’re rewarding participation and generosity most of all.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.* We’re going to have anti-abuse measures in place, and we think the top five will be clean.** The interest level will be very high. After all, the Harry Potter group on LibraryThing has seen some 11,532 messages.

Have fun tonight. Me? I’m watching over the littlest Weasley, while my wife and niece party with the wizards.

*If we get a lot of sock-puppet votes, we may make the top-five part of the contest only count votes from established members.
**But I won’t be reading the reviews myself. I am stuck in book five, recently restarted. Arg.

Labels: contest, harry potter, labelled for your delectation, ocelot, reviews

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Project Ocelot: Social changes

New look; new connections controls.

This announces a series of major “social” improvements, previously dubbed “Project Ocelot.”* Most have already been released, but were never blogged.

They were talked about, however—and how! The first batch were released to the Recommended Site Improvements group on July 11, where they garnered 187 messages. Two pre-release topics, here and here, racked up another 228 messages. And there were spin-off topics too.

As usual around here, the conversation drove our work. It was a great fun to work through everything with everyone. In case there is any doubt, developing LibraryThing is a blast.**

Here’s a run-down of the changes:

1. Friends and Interesting Libraries. (On your profile.) LibraryThing now offers a number of different “connections” between members. Shared books are still primary, but we’ve added “Interesting Libraries,” “Friends” and “Private Watchlist.”*** Interesting libraries are a one-way thing, although the person you mark as interesting gets a heads-up notice. “Friends” is a mutual connection. “Private Watch Lists” are still private. You can edit your connections, and see who has you on their lists.

Previous “friend” proposals have caused some concern, so we took pains to overcome most objections. We made “interesting libraries” the first option, to keep focus on the books. Friends don’t show up unless both sides consent. And you can disable “friending” and block users. The term “friends” itself rubbed a few people the wrong way—I’ve only just gotten over it myself—but it’s success is clear. Since the changes went live 60% of connections ahve been “friend” connections.

2. Connection News. (On your profile.) You can now follow what your connections are doing on LibraryThing—the books they’re adding, the reviews they write, the books they rate. You can choose any of the new categories (eg., “Friends”) or the fifty users who share the most books with you. This is my favorite feature. It’s something LibraryThing was missing. I think it adds a lot.

Members who share my favorite authors.

3. Shared Favorites (Introduced today). (On all profiles.) Some time ago, we started allowing members to list their favorite authors. Well, now you can find out who shares them with you. Here, for example, is Abby’s list. Mine is too obscure still.

4. Rating Reviews (Introduced Wedensday). LibraryThing a supportive environment. We didn’t want the “vote wars” that Amazon books can have. So, we are allowing members to vote for good reviews with a thumbs-up. But there’s no thumbs-down.

We did add flags for Terms of Service abuse and for non-reviews. (Wherever reviews are found; the feature is being discussed here.)

5. “Also On” Connections. (On your profile.) This is the most technically interesting of the features. For some time, users have been able to record what other sites they belonged to, and their site handles there. “Also On” Connections parses your “Also Ons” to get your sites, and then checks public information from these sites to get your friends’ lists. These lists are then cross-checked against LibraryThing’s “Also On.”

Basically, it help you to fill in the gaps in your social network on LibraryThing. We made it when we ran a test and discovered that lots of users were friends on Flickr or BookMooch, but not on LibraryThing. Probably many didn’t even know their friend was on LibraryThing.

6. Invitations. (On your profile.) Altay made a nice, understated “Invitations” feature, that sends out invites to the people you select.

7. Search tweaks. (On search.) Search now allows “also on” searching.

Of course, we have more to do—a lot more, here, on the core cataloging features****, and with translation (one update there).

*Name discussed here.
**It’s odd, but LibraryThing involves its “users” in its development more than most open-source projects. Open source projects have more focus on developer-to-developer conversations. We almost never talk about technology, but always about features.
***There was a brief period when we had “public” and “private” contacts. All public contacts became “interesting libraries”.
****We should have some good announcements here soon.

Labels: new feature, new features, ocelot, reviews, social networking