"Users with your books" is better
Update: The server migration appears to have gone off without a hitch—anyway, LT's had of the usual random, corrupting crashes since the changeover. I am a little behind on email, but will be—amazing to say—out of touch today.The "Users with your books" box on user profiles shows how many books you—or any user—share with other LibraryThing users. Unfortunately, it counts all books equally—Harry Potter as much as something rare. And there was no dampening of big libraries, so everyone had the largest library, ellenandjim, near the top.
LibraryThing used to have a page that munged your "shared books" in various ways. The algorithm was, however, very inefficient, so I had to drop it somewhere around 1 million books. I've brought it back. It better than ever and it wont clog the server (another side-benefit of the new "works" system).
You can see the new feature by clicking the "weighted" link in the "Users with your books" box on your profile. It takes account of both book obscurity and library size. It really works for me, anyway, sifting to the top a number of users I'd never seen, but who share some of my favorite stuff. Try it out and tell me what you think.
PS: The 2:30am EST downtime is still on.
PPS: Feel free to chime in on this topic. My first task in the next week or so is to work on bugs and infelicities. After that, should I work on a "groups" system or a "forum"? A groups system would, among other things, allow a group of friends, a club or other association to easily search a bunch of libraries. There would also be group profiles and so forth. A "forum" feature would bring interactive, mutli-person discussion to LibraryThing. It would be very closely tied to the work, author and tag system, not just being "another place" to discuss books. (It would, of course, have a place to discuss bugs too.)
posted by Tim at 8:05 PM
47 Comments:
FYI: It doesn't seem to be working for me (iMac OS9.2, IE5). I click on "weighted" and nothing happens, not even the little announcement that it might take awhile. It did work when I went to another browser.
Oh, and I like it!
Hmmm. Can you give me your exact version? It's been a while since I cared about IE5 on OS9—I know LibraryThing looks crappy on it—but I do remember that 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 are materially different. I do have an OS9 machine on my desk, however, so I can work on this problem.
20 minutes ago, it was working for me - and promised to be quite interesting. Now, the raw/weighted links aren't even showing up.
It does seem ok but the bug I reported on the Google group is still there: Changing the sort order pulls you out of the books you share with that user and dumps you into their entire library.
To get a decent idea of what we've got in common I always click twice on "Shared" to get the most obscure stuff at the top.
It looks great with Mac Mozilla/SeaMonkey. It's nice to have this feature back.
Another addition would be to let people see the complement/inverse (or whatever it should be called). In other words: I can see who comes out on the top of my similarity list; but on whose similarity list do I come out on top?
RJO
Please work on the forum first after you clean up bugs. It'd be nice to have only one place to check for bug reports/feature requests instead of having to jump back and forth between the blog and the Google Group.
Speaking of feature requests: the ability to make certain tags private, while keeping the rest of the library public would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for all your hard work.
I really want the forum. I find Google groups completely offputting, and feel like I'm missing out.
Heads up to the casual combiner: please read titles carefully! The following were combined:
Four Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Four Comedies : The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Four Great Comedies of William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream; As You Like It; The Tempest; Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Four Great Comedies : The Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Twelfth Night; The Tempest by William Shakespeare
In the very large author pages this kind of thing is tricky to spot! FWIW the various editions labelled just "Four Comedies" are combined with the correct collections - how this changes as more are added I don't know. Tim? Will new titles in this vein be collected with the same ISBN, one of the titles, or left as separate entries until someone combines them manually?
Tim,
Please do groups first, asked for this a while ago and would value far more than a forum.
Sort groups and them somewhere for them to talk is my vote.
BTW, I suspect that Blog and Googlegroup feedback may be biassed to forum as the type of people who tend to use them are similar, making the audience self selecting
TCarter
Also have problem with 'users with your books'....
Running Mac OS 9.1 and IE 5.0
Doesn't show up and hasn't since you first put it back. If my husband signs in at the same time on the machine on his desk (Safari) then I will get it for a short time (via our home network?). Another odd thing : on some other profile pages it comes up and on some it doesn't.
Oh Yes, forum first, please.
Tricia (hailelib)
Tim - it's basic IE5.0.
(And I vote for forums, too.)
"Massage Data" (in extras)
hmmm Massages while reading....
Oh you mean message, yes?
oh and I vote for forums...
"all this seems to be filtering a knat to save a camel....all the specificity?"
"All this" being what, the feature in question or LibraryThing in general? I find the weighted connections gives me the best connections. As for the statistics, well lots of people really go for them.
I think a virtual-reality tour of members libraries would be cool, but I don't think it would be better. VR is a fine way to see and do some things. But it's not the best way to do other things. VR hasn't taken over the way people thought it would it part because non-VR metaphors can be quite good. A VR interface where you manipulate files and folders is not better than the flat and unreal "desktop" metaphor.
Users do like the graphical shelf, however. I wish I could offer user's libraries as a real shelf. You don't look at someone's bookshelf with the books facing you. You look at the spines.
You don't look at someone's bookshelf with the books facing you. You look at the spines.
I wonder if you gave us the ability to add scanned spines whether many of as would add them!
"wwii, magical realism, sexuality, christian living, cats"
From the front page. Can anyone think of a book that comes close to this strange selection of tags? Who might have written it? ;-)
Forums definitely pretty please.
BTW, what's people's views on entering comics into the database? Is this seen primarily as a database for "real" books?
As you can see by my library, I'm definitely entering comics. I haven't started to enter single issues yet, but that will happen at the same time I enter magazines; and other people here have entered collections of magazines. Comics are very much reading material, and if you're using LT to log a collection, it's good to have your comics entered too.
Comics certainly count as 'real books' for me.
You don't look at someone's bookshelf with the books facing you. You look at the spines.
In my case that's solely because I'm too polite to take all the books out of a shelf when visiting somebody. I'd much rather look at the cover than the spine in RL, too ;-)
I cast my vote for groups first.
I am a homeschool mom with an extensive library that I would like to make available to other homeschoolers in our region. IMO a group would fit that need perfectly. I would probably maintain a separate catalog that included curriculum items that would not be of general interest to most people here.
In looking at mediachest for this it appeared to be extremely time consuming to add all the books I have and the site is not NEARLY as wonderful as LT.
Groups first, please...then forums :-)
"wwii, magical realism, sexuality, christian living, cats"
From the front page. Can anyone think of a book that comes close to this strange selection of tags? Who might have written it? ;-)
Well except for Christian living, you might want to try Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. And old man tells war stories from Manchuria, many people classify it as magical realism though I don't agree, sexual interactions occur, and the thing starts when the protaginst's cat goes missing.
Oh and most of the good things about this book aren't even covered by those tags!
I vote for FORUMS because really, it would be good to have someplace to store all our combined knowledge in a searchable format.
However, even more important than forums? An 'editor' field.
Just wondering if you've considered a "MusicThing" or at minimum, making this site a little more cd- collection friendly.
JoelYrick
I vote for forums.. I get the google groups digest but can't really keep up with it at the moment.
Although, as TCarter said those of us who comment on the blog or the google group are likely to be self-selected in favour of a forum.
Nicer shelf-browsing would be great. You could start by recording the dimensions of a book where available (300 $c in a MARC record?), let users upload spines, and leave the implementation for later.
In fact once you've got some data in there, you could open it up via some API and let a user write an app to do a virtual library for you ;)
If you want the best 'music thing' try
www.rateyourmusic.com
Request: The profile page should remember the raw/weighted option.
One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five. Back to my catalog.
I think the main reason people look at spines is that they are stored in the shelf that way. And why are they stored like that? Space. Something we don't have to worry about in the virtual world. Do you really want to watch the screen with your head tilted 90 degrees? And as there is no univeral direction you would keep switching from left to right...
I'd also like the editor field. LT currently lists story collections with multiple writers incorrectly, IMO. Also, it would be nice to be able to list more than one author. "Other authors" isn't quite the same thing. For instance, Arkadi & Boris Strugatski were more or less equal partners, so why select one over the other as the author?
Oh, so many ideas and I realise Tim only has 24 hours in his day :) As it would be nice to have the ability to add a short biography for authors.
MusicThing. Not at present, but stay tuned. Try Stuffopolis.
Shelf-browsing: I can also get dimension from Amazon much of the time. It might be something to think about.
API: Oh, it's very much on the table.
Profile remembering raw/weighted: Okay. I can do that. I think it should only apply to your own profile, however. Agreed?
Makis: Yes, I do only have 24 hours. I hope to add a program someday in the near future. LibraryThing isn't "very" profitable, but it might support a second, particularly someone part time. There's also an argument to be made for open-sourcing it. But that's another kettle of fish.
The author system needs a rethink, no question about it. I am not going to add an "editor" field or any other such. But I think each book ought to have as many authors as you want it to have, provided one takes the lead in sorting.
T
I think rateyourmusic.com is pretty much what anyone would need for a music collector's site. I have my collection and wishlist there and have had no qualms. Can't really think of anything it misses (especially after Shariff gets RYM 2.0 done, main problem currently is with classical music).
Especially in SF there are lots of books where a well-known author creates a story collection but doesn't even necessary write a story for it himself. Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder is a case in point, Silverberg only contributed the introduction.
Most massive collection I have is "The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories" which has three editors and 101 stories from different authors..
Tim, I think you doing a great job and the 24-hour thing was just a nod that you can't possibly have time for everything people would like to see. Some of us are obsessed with details so there are quite a few fields that I'd like to see added for books but I can manage without.
Come on, who NEEDS to see the spines of someone's books??? It's boring enough having to scan some of the covers!
For books where there is no author but just an editor what is the recommended way of entering them? Is there a reason its not pulling from Amazon? I'm just going in there and pasting it in and looks like that has been done ~600 times by others if you do a search on the author editor.
For spines, could something be rigged to take the dominant colour of the cover image, print the title and author over it in a contrasting colour (size altered according to length, or truncated past a certain point, especially at colons) and voila, we can all be reading our computer screens with our heads on one side? (or opt to have piles instead of shelves, and scroll down them).
Re: Spines
I was thinking about this the other day. In principle, it seems a bit absurd to try to accomplish something that has so little comparative value, except as a simulation of real experience. But then simulations of real experience are kind of nice. I mean, ultimately wouldn't you want to "pick up" these books from LibraryThing... turn them over in your hands, page through the first few pages, admire the handsomely marbled endpapers or smile at the old library stamps from before it was discarded to the used-book sale table? Look at what Apple does now with their QTVR for their products. (http://www.apple.com/hardware/gallery/ipodhifi/) and then how Coverflow flips through CD covers (http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/HomePage.html ), and then there's Jim Bumgardner's 'coverpop' (ttp://www.coverpop.com/visco.php ). So maybe the idea of making the graphical interface more exciting isn't just "spines on the shelf" and maybe it isn't a dead end either.
Thanks, Dystopos, I will get quite a few Analog covers at the Visco site!
Come on, who NEEDS to see the spines of someone's books??? It's boring enough having to scan some of the covers!
Nobody NEEDS to; nobody needs to see the covers, either. But it's nice to see them.
And if you think scanning the covers is boring, don't do it! It's not required, after all.
That would be an interesting way to make the site go. $10/$25 or you have to scan 50 covers that aren't already in the system :) . After all, the better the site the more visitors it gets, and many of those will pay the $10/$25.
lilithcat, I can understand the covers and I scanned mine because, however boring I found it, I like to have my colourful graphical shelf, but the spines... it's just a useless waste of time IMO.
But if you feel like doing it, go ahead, Ididn't want to sound harsh.
:-)
What we need, of course, is a scanner where you put the book on it and it scans the cover, back cover and spine. (Then it scans the inside by x-ray or maybe sonography.)
The question is, by the time anyone can scan every book, will they have already been scanned? It's like what some 19th century worthy said about Greek—by the time you know you can read all of it, you have.
Tim
Wow! In about 1/2 an hour, I added all the Analog Magazine covers I needed from the site mentioned above. I only had about 2 years worth, but they look great in my catalog!
voting for forum as well
hope you have some other means to pay for life time subscribe other than paypal though, since not everybody could use paypal. it doesn't serve my country even the just accept cc option doesn't work that way either cause it only serve the countries the countries payapl is available
I just clicked on a user and clicked on the "book you share with this person link?" in their library and the first page (20 books) shows up fine. However all the links to the rest of the pages go to the regular non-shared-books view of their library.
This is honestly my favorite feature of the site, so hopefully it returns to its full functionality soon.
M<><
ps- my wife agreed for me to purchase a membership, so I'm excited I'll be able to move past 200 books!
mr.c
yes it need fixing. there is some discusion of this on the google group.
There are 2 ways round your problem.
1) if the number of common books is less than 50 you can go to change fields and change the number of books per page.
2) the URL http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=username&compare=yourname&offset=20 with the obvious substitutions for username and yourname will display common books starting at the 21st, then offset=40 etc.
You know what I'd love to see? A list of books that I share with no other Thinger. Now, I know that's a bit anti-social, but it would be interesting. As I scroll through my catalog now I always raise my eyebrows when I see a book with no other users listed. Usually, it's because our data entry doesn't match up, and somebody else does have the book, but sometimes, I'm really the only one. When that happens, I feel I should go give that book a little love pat, and maybe read it again.
really tickled to have made this valuable discovery! but how do i link librarything with myspace webpage??? i would like to share my personal library with others.
oh my account the second "Members with your books" is bbonnet (8/27) and has been for about a week, but when I click on the name, it says we only have one book in common. Any ideas what's going on?
Post a Comment
<< Home