Groups, part deux
It's now been just over 24 hours since we released the Groups feature, and we're astounded at how it's taken off. As Kevin Costner was once told, "If you build it, they will come."*
We have 170** groups already, with a wild range of topics from Book Arts to Romance, from Austen to Byatt to Crusie. Librarians who LibraryThing took an early lead, and now has a whopping 82 members. I love it.
And there are 599 messages*** in the system - you apparently couldn't wait to talk to each other (most active message board? Tea!). It's a push for us (*cough*Tim*cough*) to finish up the more complex forum system (which will function on it's own, but also be integrated into the Groups). I'll let Tim eat dinner first, but then, he's back to work.
Keep posting your comments on the GoogleGroup - as always, it's a work in progress, so give us feedback.
(clearly, I'm picking up Tim's blog footnotes tendency)
*I know that's not quite the quote, but everyone gets the Field of Dreams reference, right? Well, now that I gave it to you...
**172 groups now, in the time it took me to write this
***and 612 messages!
We have 170** groups already, with a wild range of topics from Book Arts to Romance, from Austen to Byatt to Crusie. Librarians who LibraryThing took an early lead, and now has a whopping 82 members. I love it.
And there are 599 messages*** in the system - you apparently couldn't wait to talk to each other (most active message board? Tea!). It's a push for us (*cough*Tim*cough*) to finish up the more complex forum system (which will function on it's own, but also be integrated into the Groups). I'll let Tim eat dinner first, but then, he's back to work.
Keep posting your comments on the GoogleGroup - as always, it's a work in progress, so give us feedback.
(clearly, I'm picking up Tim's blog footnotes tendency)
*I know that's not quite the quote, but everyone gets the Field of Dreams reference, right? Well, now that I gave it to you...
**172 groups now, in the time it took me to write this
***and 612 messages!
posted by Abby at 6:28 PM
16 Comments:
Ooh... I just noticed the "Group Zeitgeist" link! Very cool!
Yeah, this is really great. But I think it is going to get expensive trying to find all the books I'll want to read. Not to mention how angry my wife will be that I'm not working on 'honey do's'.
I have a bad feeling I've written more messages than anybody.... but it's wonderful to have the groups up and running.
I couldn't use the invitation feature for the 'British & Irish children's fiction' group. maybe it's choking on the ampersand or the apostrophe?
Aquila. Duly noted. Thanks.
Can someone please explain how these touchstones are supposed to work? I put single brackets around a [work], but it doesn't seem to go anywhere. I screwed up once because I didn't read the notes correctly, but the next time I did what they said. WTH?
Note to eurydice: don't worry! I've been inviting people to the Japanese Culture group like a MAD THING - and trying to respond to all the responses. It's crazy... and lots of fun :-)
Thank you for this wonderful new feature, Tim & Co. I think it's safe to say we all love it!
Tim, I know you've said that you're tired of hearing about it, but I just wanted to thank you sincerely for restoring the 20-image 'Shelf view'.
one small fault. groups with the most members gives the number of members in the form (133 messages). Example is librarians.
And now it's memberss. Preciousssss.
Ssorry about the ssibilance.
Baggass: Good idea. Thanks.
Just a note so that maybe you can pre-empt a problem that has grown on Flickr. Having a way to merge groups could be useful as people start a group and later discover an existing group on the same topic. I know there are some tricky issues regarding administration, but since you've figured out a way to "combine works" I'm sure you can figure this one out, too.
To piggyback on baggas's question ... is there any chance that you could add Shared Tags to the Group Zeitgeist page? Or if that's too big a block of text, perhaps something like Top 50 Shared Tags?
When I was inviting people to the Japanese Culture page, I used the Search page to find all the related tags I could think of (Japan, Japanese culture, Japanese language, etc.) and then invited those people who had a high number of books tagged with at least one of these.
Once members have joined, however, it would be wonderful to have an instant overview of other members' collections based on our common tags (particularly the Japan-related ones). Our common area of interest is actually a very broad one - this is the case with many other groups - of course - so this would give members the means to check which other members share their tags/areas of special interest.
The Group Zeitgeist page is perhaps the ideal spot, although I wouldn't mind if it went on the Group Profile page, either (say, below the new RSS feed boxes).
Obviously we can exist comfortably without this feature, but it would be tremendously useful. Please think about it?
I just found the Groups feature today and I was so impressed with it! I joined a few groups and started one of my own (Fans of Russian authors). Thanks for this fab feature! :)
I have to post this annonymous because I can't get a blog account, it never lets me :( I am BookAddict
What are the benefits of Groups? i.e. What can you do with it?
Thanks.
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