Reviews and power users
I've added a "power user" button into the catalog (next to "search library"). I'm going to hang a lot on it later—I want to keep the interface simple for new users, but give people with hundreds of books new options.
At present it just adds two things: the delete icon
, which people have been clamoring for, an a 
icon, which tells you if you've reviewed something (
just tells you it's reviewed). When you're in power-user mode you can also sort by whether or not you've reviewed it. It sorts your reviews first, then books reviewed by others, then unreviewed books.
Now my question: Clearly I need a page listing what books a given user has reviewed and another listing recently-reviewed books, books with the most reviews, etc. But how much stress should reviews have? How interested are people in it? Should I, for example, have a "Reviews" tab like the "Tags" tab? Would this convey the impression that LibraryThing was all about reviewing and discussing? I want to keep some focus. This site is not a universal book portal. It's a book-cataloging service with some diverting social extensions.
Opinions pro and con solicited.
PS: Next up—"Power tagging." Vroosh!
At present it just adds two things: the delete icon
, which people have been clamoring for, an a icon, which tells you if you've reviewed something ( just tells you it's reviewed). When you're in power-user mode you can also sort by whether or not you've reviewed it. It sorts your reviews first, then books reviewed by others, then unreviewed books.Now my question: Clearly I need a page listing what books a given user has reviewed and another listing recently-reviewed books, books with the most reviews, etc. But how much stress should reviews have? How interested are people in it? Should I, for example, have a "Reviews" tab like the "Tags" tab? Would this convey the impression that LibraryThing was all about reviewing and discussing? I want to keep some focus. This site is not a universal book portal. It's a book-cataloging service with some diverting social extensions.
Opinions pro and con solicited.
PS: Next up—"Power tagging." Vroosh!
posted by Tim at 8:44 PM
12 Comments:
If "power tagging" is adding tags to multiple books at once, it'll make my life mucho easier. And a big THANK YOU - I've been looking for years for something like this that is fast and reliable... have tried Bibliophil and been disappointed, never even found the other one you mentioned... and this I like already. Added 80 books in about 20 minutes time... have literally thousands more I've read to add. I'm tempted to go ahead and join--- but it's new, and $10 isn't a lot to most people, but to a low-income single mom of four, it is to me, so it says a lot just that I'm tempted. And I may give in and do it shortly anyways--- can't imagine anyone doing this amount of work if they aren't planning to be in it for the long haul.
I think you're right: a "Reviews" tab would start to shift focus.
That said, it'd be nice to be able to easily browse reviews, or maybe even hit a "+" or "-" sign, indicating agreement or disagreement with the review. Or something.
All in all, I'm less interested in reviews and more interested in RSS for every page/user/tag. :-)
Sidenote in reference to Shawna's comment: it'd be nice to be able to buy or "sponsor" another user. I can think of several folks off the top of my head for whom I'd buy an account.
Mmm. Just thought of something else. An idea- don't know if it's realistic or not- is being able to add multiple books from a search all at once a possibility?
On the review front- I don't care much about having reviews- I tend to disagree with them as much as I agree, at least with fiction, and that makes them pretty useless, IMO. I feel the same about ratings. I can take it or leave it. The part that really captures my interest is the tagging... that equals book recommendations to me. I also like that I'm shown who else has similar books- that will become more useful the more people and books are here, I would imagine- because the more books we share, the more likely it is that I'll like their other choices.
Personally, I don't think you need a tab. What you might consider is make a 'sort by' drop down list somewhere that gives 'reviews' as one of the options.
I would like to see a feature that would eliminate some of my books from being compared with other libraries. The reason is that I don't like all of my books. So if I see someone and we have 30 books in common, it doesn't necessarily mean we share tastes. This would make the review feature more or less unneeded for my purposes. On the other hand, this is kind of an argument for having a review feature.
In the grand scheme of things, it's a diversion. There are things you could do (and I imagine you're working on) to make cataloging better. Shawna's idea of multiple picks from a search, for example. If you did that before I get to "P", I could enter "Pepys, California" and get all the diary at once.
Nice idea, I've just posted on my blog about it.
Cheers
I agree with you that Librarything should remain focused on the books and the catalog than on the reviews. I don't think that a rating system should be instituted because then I can see people starting to judge books by how many stars it got, etc. - we can see ratings on Amazon, which Librarything is linked to. I think stars would start emphasizing a reviews aspect of Librarything.
I don't mind the reviews and having links to them because it can be quite handy to review what I thought of them at the time and maybe fun to check out what others think once in awhile, but pretty much it is a diversion and not why I become interested and really excited about Librarything. I think that what you have now for reviews is enough.
I'm more interested in being able to edit my entries, maybe being able to do batch editing of books so that I could change tags on books, etc.
BTW, I think flickr does a good job of emphasizing photos and combining social components, although they really emphasize the social aspect there. Maybe flickr would be a good model to study for Librarything's growth? not to copy but to see if this site wants to go in that direction?
Hmm....I know what you mean; nevertheless, the "diverting social extensions" are probably going to be what will drive traffic to the site. One wants to see what other people have that one might be interested in, and tagging will do this to a degree, but I can imagine there being users whose opinions on books I might want to add to my library I'd be interested in knowing beforehand.
One thing I'd like for the review feature is that if you put in a link to a review, that link became "clickable" when viewed in the catalog. Or does the field itself support html in the entry? Seems like it would be easier to set it up to autoconvert a href tags.
LibraryThing rocks!
reader42 said... "I would like to see a feature that would eliminate some of my books from being compared with other libraries. The reason is that I don't like all of my books."
Seems to me the simplest solution to this (or at least, the quickest) is to assign all such books a single derisive tag, such as "I_own_but_dislike_this", "crap", or similar. Then if someone browses you on the basis of owning that book, they'll quickly understand how you feel about it.
Sorting by publication date column on a search of LibraryThing books containing "screwtape" ( all books ) does not appear to work... I get two 1962's, then 2001's, then 1982 editions, then 2001 again...
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