requested features vs "fluff"

I love LibraryThing, and this is not a post meant to bash LT in any way, I just wanted to put it out there (because I know I'm not the only one feeling this way).

There are MANY features that have been constantly requested, and that Tim and co. has said is on the "to do" list or whatever... I'm talking about wishlists, some way to differentiate between owned and unowned books (besides tags), and private tags/private books, just to name a few. These have been mentioned over and over, always with the response that it's on the to-do list or they are looking into it.

In the meantime, however, new "fluff" features are being added to LT that have not been requested and, while nice, are not a priority. At first I was okay with it, but now that I've been waiting awhile for certain features (wishlist) I have to admit that it bugs me.

Heather

I echo what Heather19 says above about loving LT, and I would add my #1 request: support for multiple authors and fields for other contributors to books. I know there was a test version of this once, many months ago, because Tim gave us a peek at it, and I know that I'm far from alone in pining for it. I would love to know if it is a priority and when we might see it.

There are a few issues.

Firstly, there are many people all who put different priorities on stuff. I would like the multiple-responsibility stuff (multiple authors, illustrator, cover artist etc) and cataloguing of sub-work. I would put wishlist (and the other stuff you mention) down as fluff. So it isn't just a simple case of the entire user-base clamouring for one thing or not. There are probably a 101 suggestions which have to be considered.

Secondly, a lot of the substantial changes are probably going to have to touch the main database tables. This makes them more tricky to build, test, and deploy.

Thirdly (and thankfully lastly), things like tag-mirror seem like they were pretty low-hanging fruit. They don't seem to require lots of development or any table changes.

And don't forget private books/comments/tags, which would make some of the currently private libraries happy enough to unprivate some of their catalog...

I have to agree.

Wishlist, read but not owned list and private everything are the three features that show up on every request list and get seconded by lots of people. You make them happen, and a lot of users become happy (at least for a while, it's a never ending battle :)).

I also share these concerns, to a certain extent. I think Tim did mention making another new hire recently, so I'm hoping things will improve.

A lot of the frequently-requested features are complicated to implement, so I understand the lack of progress on things like a sub-work system.

My frustration is more about the lack of attention to smaller, easier requests. The wishlist feature is one that doesn't seem particularly difficult, and it looked like it was so close to being implemented. I recently read through the old thread about small improvements and consolidated it, crossing off the ones that had been accomplished--and it was sort of discouraging to see how little had been done. There are some things there, like adding a date stamp to the zeitgeist, that should really have been implemented by now. I think it would be nice if Tim devoted maybe an hour or even half an hour a week to simple user requests.

As for the new features that are being implemented instead, there are some (well, at least one--the tag mirror) that I really like. But others, like Connection News, feel very incomplete, and it's frustrating to think that enough time was spent on that to take away from other features, but not enough time to make it really useful. If it can show recently added, I'd think it would be only a matter of minutes to add recently read, started, and acquired. It would also be a lot more useful if we could use it for sub-groups of our watch list; people are on my watch list for various reasons and I'm not necessarily interested in seeing what all of them have done recently. But as is, I barely ever use that feature, so I consider it mostly a waste of time.

I think my perspective changed a lot when I saw how Christopher was implementing the thumbs-up feature for reviews--for every user suggestion, he either implemented it almost immediately, or explained why it was too complicated or a bad idea. It raised my standards for the responsiveness of the LT staff as a whole.

> 1

First, what is "fluff" to you is important to someone else. Personally, I think "Wish lists" are fluff, I think differentiating between owned/unowned is fluff. Why? Because I have no use for either. Does that mean they shouldn't be done? Of course not.

Furthermore, some features, which may seem simple on the face of it, may actually require serious reworking of the site, or other improvements first, on which to build the new feature.

Let's remember, too, that some of the desired changes may require specific skills to implement. Tim has lost and hired some staff over the past few months, which may also account for what has and hasn't been done.

I'll chime in and answer a few concerns here.
First of all, collections/wish list/read but not owned is coming (yeah, yeah). No really, it's coming soon.

To address your overall concerns, we do read what people want and more than likely we want the same things. Don't forget that we also use the site just as you do, so if you want a wish list chances are pretty good that we also want one. But sometimes the "low hanging fruit" gets the first attention, other times there is a big update being worked on that would nullify any work put into fixes that it will overwrite. In those cases it may not seem like any progress is being made while the big project is being worked on. This applies to a few things in your list.

Other times, lilithcat is right, we either don't have the staffing to completely cover every issue right away or we we are missing staff that have a specific skill set. These are issues that are hard to solve overnight and Tim has put considerable time into finding quality LT staff.

Rest assured that we are working very hard to implement many changes to LT. Could we do better? Sure we could. There's always room for improvement.

9: Thank you for responding and explaining more. It certainly reassures me to know the reasoning and explanations behind the going-ons at LT.

Just to let you all know, I certainly don't mean to put down LT in any way... what I meant by "fluff" isn't things I don't consider nice/important, simply things that haven't been asked for and stuff like that.

Heather

> 8

I interpreted 1> to mean things that were not "features long and often requested by users" to be the "fluff". I, too, have little interest in using a wishlist here at LT, but that doesn't discount that many, many other users here have stated a desire for it. It's therefore a major user request and I'd never label it "fluff".

On the other hand, as an example there's the new Tag Mirror. I've been looking at it, find it rather interesting, have been following the discussions on it. But was it ever requested by any user? I don't think so, and so for purposes of this thread, I might qualify it as "fluff". And I admit to wondering why attention was paid to develop it apparently in favor of other things that have been requested.

> 9

I appreciate the words from a LT staff member, conceptDawg. I'll add that I'm a professional software engineer too. My job consists, day in and day out, of hearing requests from our users for system enhancements, and then helping to prioritize, design, build and deploy said enhancements. Oh, and helping users actually use the system day-to-day.

Of course some changes are simple, some complex, some are major overhauls to the underlying architecture. One thing we do to keep our clients from hunting us down (I'm in an internal IT shop for a major corporation, so our clients are our coworkers and they can find us) is to periodically give out progress / status reports on the major or frequently requested enhancements. Would that be at all possible here? Or maybe it is, and I haven't been looking in the right place?

I do understand the staffing issue too. My team is a whopping two people.

Suncat: A publisher thought the tagcloud was interesting, so LT staff applied it to the rest of us?

#12: Possibly. And I think it is a valid reason for the LT crew to develop features. After all, the publisher crowd is also footing part of the bills here ;-).

> 12, 13

This is quite possible. And wouldn't this mean that the publishers have become part of the user base for LT? Their requests certainly should not be considered "fluff".

But I was trying to draw a distinction between something seemingly quite new vs. requests from users which have been floating around for many months. If I understand the development history of the Tag Mirror correctly (no guarantee of that!), it was created and then shown to the publishers. Other long-standing requests haven't gotten the same development attention, as far as we know.

Form the history so far requests from users, whether for new features or bug fixes, don't carry any great weight per se. If they happen to catch the attention of a developer, and coincide with their 'current' interests and capabilities, then they may be dealt with.

Wish lists (and their close relative, collections) have been 'nearly here' a couple of times but never quite delivered. Search is currently in its third major iteration, at least one of which never saw the light of day.

This is not to say that Tim and the team are not aware of and attentive to the wishes/bugs recorded here; they just don't always get to the top of the heap. Tim said very early on that he didn't want to have a formal bug-list or use a bug-tracker (though I suspect that he may find that he needs a private one as his coding team grows).

Tim has also been pretty clear that his first priority is the promotion of LT to new users, and in particular to library users, who offer the income stream that he needs.

13:The publishers are paying? I was unaware of this I thought the ARC program was free for them.

Without entering into the debate about the precise definition of "fluff", I'd like to note that the datebase already includes a "Series" field (visible when a library is downloaded into spreadsheet format) that would be very useful to many LTers but is currently inaccessible. Is there some reason why it can't be made available?

#17: LT is constantly under construction, so it's possible that Tim&Co. are preparing something there. But often these things cannot simply be "switched on" but need a rewrite of code and/or the user interface (which in turn takes time). I hadn't seen the series field before, so there is *something* going on... ;-).

18: The Series field has been present in export and noted for months, so that's not new.

Since I don't use the export frequently (it comes out as garbage in my OpenOffice database documents, and I need to find a PC with Windows Office), I didn't notice it that early. :-)

> 20 : GirlFromIpanema : both export formats will open OK in an OpenOffice spreadsheet if you specify a file type of Text CSV.

#21, I have downloaded the newest version of OO now and will try again (CSV didn't work in my version, a 1.x, couldn't properly read line breaks, it seems).

After conceptDawg's message:
("First of all, collections/wish list/read but not owned is coming (yeah, yeah). No really, it's coming soon. ")

I'm hoping it will be tommorrow. Why? Its the sites second birthday!

17-19> The series field has been there since I first started on LT. I downloaded my library to see how everything was uploading within days of my join date and that series field was there. So at least since December 2006. I had a copy of my download from then but had to delete it. There we go, I have a copy from January 2007 and that has the series field.

In the meantime, however, new "fluff" features are being added to LT that have not been requested and, while nice, are not a priority.

Do we really know what features have been requested? For all we know, a new "unrequested" feature may be in response to flood of e-mails.

conceptDawg 9, we've heard that line ("collections/wish list/read but not owned is coming") before. Forgive me if I don't hold my breath.

In general, I believe you that you're working hard on implementing new features and enhancing existing ones (and I appreciate it!); I for one would just like a little bit more communication about what's going on (though not so much that it takes too much time away from actual development!) Even a basic list of "actively working on" / "low-priority projects" / "not currently working on this" would be better than what we have now, which is only finding out about something when it's rolled out.

26:
We are working on BOTH of these things. Collections are coming...and I forgive you for not believing me. I understand.

A couple of us are going to start work in the next week or so on a new communication feature that might correct some of this. We'll see. But it will be a little while before it is put into production (coding, testing, coding, testing, etc.)

Some quick points:

We are certainly trying to hit the big targets. A priority is stabiltiy amid growth. Today—finally—we should have a dedicated sysadmin signed up, although he will continue to work for his old job for four weeks. That this fellow lives in Australia—Tasmania, in fact—is a nice clue to how hard it's been to find the right person.

Some updates:

1. Better search—general and touchstones—was a big request, and deeply tied into stability. The old search had us keeping two servers just for search. We changed the underlying plumbing, moving from MyISAM to Solr. It's now on a fraction of a server. So, we made progress there.

2. Site speed has also been a concern for us. We've made big strides there, with a sturdy new database and memory caching system. Lots of tag pages have gone from 90 seconds to less than 1.

A lot of this work goes on behind the scenes. For example, I've spent the last two days adding tools to monitor slow pages (rather than database requests). It's given me a guide to priorities.

3. Getting diacriticals right is also a big request. The new search does that, but more generally, Casey is working on a new script to import library data, which will avoid all these problems. It's not for no reason that LibraryThing's competitors don't tie into libraries, let alone parse something like "DANMARC" (the Danish flavor of MARC), or that the Library of Congress's online catalog is almost as fraught with diacritical problems as LT is. We're not dealing with Amazon's XML here.

Best of all, however, hiring Casey and having him work on this stuff means we'll be able to add dozens or more new libraries. Although no single library gets requested over and over, my inbox is FULL of requests to add Hebrew data, or get the Polish one working, etc.

4. Facebook is certainly a big request—while being totally unwanted by another group, but that's life. It's something we have to do to stay competitive, and it takes a LOT of work. We're making progress, but we also recognize a killer Facebook ap. presupposes both collections and a new, generalized data-import function.

5. Collections are, in fact, finally coming. Chris has the underlying code completed, so it's a matter of making a good UI and drawing on the code here and there, as needed. I'm guessing we get it out soon. Soon means this week or next. It'll probably come in slowly.

When you experiment, you go down blind alleys. Collections, for example, went very far down one road—when Chris was working for us some time ago. We had a solution that made collections a special instance of tagging. Going down that road very far convinced us that the underlying idea was flawed and needed to be rethought. Then Christopher, who had written all the code, had to quit LT for a while to finish his BA. It's possible that when someone leaves Microsoft, the dancing paper clip continues to dance. Not on LibraryThing.

Collection is, incidentally, a good example of something that seems easy, but isn't. It basically inserts a new join table into every single script that accesses your books.

6. Beta means fun. You may not like LibraryThing to play, but we're not going to stop. It's good press. Tag mirrors got picked up by some of the top tech blogs, like Weinberger, and the Unsuggester has been a HUGE draw to LibraryThing--from Slashdot to articles in various papers. But we don't do stuff like that because it's good PR. We do it because it's fun. No apologies.

Collections! Whooohooo! I'll be watching for it!

> 28

Dear Tim:

Just reading that post makes me tired! If I haven't said it before, I'll say it now (and if I have, I'll say it again): I truly appreciate the hard work you put into this site to make it easy, accessible and fun.

I hope that your post will demonstrate to people that site improvement isn't as easy as pushing a button! As a non-techie person, I have in the past occasionally said, "oh, pooh, why can't they do thus-and-so?" Fortunately, my dalliances on this and other sites (such as Bookcrossing) have taught me something about the behind-the-scenes complexities involved in making what we see on our computer screens work.

So thank you again (and Happy LT Birthday).

Lilithcat, a happy customer

Tim, thanks for all the updates, and please keep playing - unexpected new angles on the LTverse are one of the things that keep me coming back.

Tim and Christopher (27, 28), thanks for the replies! And thinking about collections in terms of a join rather than a couple boolean fields (which I'll admit is how I'd been thinking about it, and is probably what you tried with the 'special instance of tagging' you mention) does emphasize the difficulty. (Though I never thought it was easy, just fundamental -- but the fundamental things are often the hardest!)

(And I love the Unsuggester and tag mirror. Couldn't care less about Facebook, but I'm sure it will bring in a lot of new members, which could hardly be a bad thing.)

Yeah. Oh how we've gone back on forth on booleans and etc. Right now, a book will be able to belong to any number of collections. The trick is the UI. When you want to put something in currently reading you don't want to remove it from "your library." When you put something in "wish list" you do probably do. We're probably going to seek refuge in a check-box UI.

T

Good luck with determining the effect/labels of said checkboxes...

And I know I'd appreciate a way to have general categories/collections within my library too; maybe a top-level menu of selected tags.

Tim & Chris, thanks for the updates. Excellent! Collections! Searches! Diacriticals! *happy dance*
(but should you ever roll out a paperclip thingy, I am outta here! ;-) )

Tim & Chris: As much as I wish that some of the long-standing suggestions LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SORTING would be implemented, and I'm waiting with bated breath to see how collections comes out, I love playing with the unexpected shiny things too. So thanks for the work, and the updates!

No, it's going to be "Booker the book worm."

Tim & Chris,

I'm looking forward to the new developments you mentioned.

I generally agree with #30.

Chris has the underlying code completed.... when Chris was working for us some time ago.... Then Christopher, who had written all the code, had to quit LT for a while to finish his BA....

I'm so confused now. Is conceptDawg Chris or Christopher?

Ha. Sorry. He's both.

We had a Chris for a while, which made us refer to Christopher as Christopher. But actually Chris is—correct me if I'm wrong, Chris(topher)—more often known as Chris.

Believe it or not, I considered hiring a guy with the last name Spalding!

Tim & Chris,

Thanks for the updates, the news about collections and diacriticals, and the impending new communications feature. I really do love this site you've put together, even if I occasionally sound critical.

Believe it or not, I considered hiring a guy with the last name Spalding!

Don't do that! That way madness lies!

Though I do know a couple who own a floral design business who are Mike and Mikel. They once hired a guy named Mikey. He didn't last.

Tim -

It's not that we don't think you're working - we know you are and that LT is your baby. It's just that when updates are mentioned here and there, as they get finished or updated, in various different groups and threads, we don't always see what's being done.

The last thing I want to do is make more work for you, but your message 28 is wonderful - it tells us what you've been working on and what you are working on, why things some people have expected to see already aren't up and running already, and so on.

Have you considered posting something like a monthly consolodation of updates (like that post), for example like livejournal does?

This is fantastic.

(When this does see the light of day, I'll get a gift membership for a friend -- there should be SOME way for us lifetime paid members to show our appreciation for long-awaited features, other than just cheering loudly.)

28: *claps* You have no idea how happy I am to read all of this, Tim! Or heck, maybe you do. I'm so glad that collections will be implimented soon, and it's really great and reassuring to get a better understanding of where you are on everything and the things that go into making these changes.

This is why I really agree with #26, it would be really nice to have some kind of list or notice that simply keeps us up-to-date with what's going on.... We had no idea all that stuff was going on behind the scenes until this thread. I think it would benefit us all to have something that helps us understand what is in the works, what's on the list, what isn't a priority right now, etc.

(This makes me even more certain that I'm doing a good thing by saving up money to donate to LT!)

Heather

>44 lorax: to show our appreciation

I did this today by purchasing a lifetime gift subscription. I "gifted" it to LT via email to Abby and Tim.

> "That this fellow lives in Australia—Tasmania, in fact—is a nice clue to how hard it's been to find the right person."

Will that mean the data will be upside down now :P

It is already upside down and a day behind, to boot!

:)

We had a Chris for a while, which made us refer to Christopher as Christopher. But actually Chris is—correct me if I'm wrong, Chris(topher)—more often known as Chris.

Okay, all is now (mostly) clear. But I think when you talk about what one of them did while they were both at LT, you should use the name that they were called by at the time.

My official name is Christopher (Holland, if you must know) and that's how I tend to go by at LT because of the previous hiring of a "Chris" (though I was here first..hmph). But pretty much anybody that knows me calls me Chris because it's just easier.

We try and use Christopher in all of my LT correspondence, but occasionally I/we fail to do so. Chris Gann no longer works at LT so that will make things a little easier for you.

I'm glad that everybody is happy with our projects that are in-progress. Hopefully we'll have something concrete for you soon!

>Okay, all is now (mostly) clear. But I think when you talk about what one of them did while they were both at LT, you should use the name that they were called by at the time.

That would be too easy!

The blog could be used for updates?

One year, with a staff of 16, the place I work had a Pat, a Patty, a Trish, and a Tricia. At least we all preferred different forms of Patricia!

Can't wait to cheer on the new stuff.

Tricia

After more than 50 posts in this thread I couldn't possibly say what I think in a better way than it has already been done by others. Thus I shall use your words to express my thoughts. I hope you won't mind ;-)

Tim&Chris thanks for the updates, the news about collections and diacriticals, and the impending new communications feature.
I'm so glad that collections will be implemented soon, and it's really great and reassuring to get a better understanding of where you are on everything and the things that go into making these changes
It would be a great idea to periodically give out progress / status reports on the major or frequently requested enhancements. Would that be at all possible here? Or maybe it is, and I haven't been looking in the right place?
Even a basic list of "actively working on" / "low-priority projects" / "not currently working on this" would be awesome, instead of only finding out about something when it's rolled out. Anyway, I can’t wait to see all those shiny new features – being able to make your books belong to any number of collections without having to remove it from “your library” sounds just what we have been waiting for :-) But please don't forget private books/comments/tags, which would make some of the currently private libraries happy enough to unprivate some of their catalog... However as much as I wish that some of the long-standing suggestions (…) would be implemented, and I'm waiting with bated breath to see how collections comes out, I love playing with the unexpected shiny things too. So thanks for the work, and the updates!

P.S. And I couldn't care less about Facebook, either, but I'm sure it will bring in a lot of new members, which could hardly be a bad thing.)

How bored are you?

> 55

Very. ;- )

ummhmm...

holiday, stuck at home, nobody around, no good movies to watch, well actually half watching one while doing stuff on the computer ;-)

> 56

Cool! Thanks for that link. :-)

54: *giggles* I'm bored a lot, but I don't think I could ever do that! *too. much. html-ness!*

Heather