Happy birthday to us!
Today (we think) marks LibraryThing's second birthday. We're now officially in the terrible twos.*A year ago we had just hit five million books on our birthday, today we're just a few hours away from 18 million books.
Birthday feature [Tim] : You begged for us to release one of the top-requested features for the birthday, so we came up with setting your display style for visitors to your library. Yes, wish lists and collections are on the way!
Numbers and factoids:
- We have 261,481 registered members. If we were a city, we'd be the 68th largest in the United States (Wikipedia), just above Plano, TX. We are on par with French Polynesia (population 259,800—Wikipedia). Unlike French Polynesia, however, we do not have an anthem. Yet.
- LibraryThing members have applied over 23 million tags. If our tags were laid end-to-end, they would stretch to the moon.**
- There are 389 reviews of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on LibraryThing. The 1,000th-most popular book on LibraryThing is Le morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory, which still has 1,247 copies. Author number 1,000 is Margaret Drabble. (You know, Margaret Drabble, don't you?)
- Nine libraries have signed up for LibraryThing for Libraries. Five have gone live with it. The first nine LTFL customers have uploaded over 1.75 million books.
- Our German site, LibraryThing.de, has 2,452 members. Our Dutch site, has the most active Talk. Finnish is our most-translated site, currently at 99.4% done.
- If LibraryThing were a library (not a city, keep up!), we'd still be the second largest in the nation, behind only the Library of Congress (ALA Fact Sheet).
- Find out what your friends are reading. Connection News lets you see what books your friends have recently added, rated, or reviewed.
Swap books. LibraryThing integrates with ten separate book swapping sites all over the world, so you can see at a glance which books are available or wanted, and move them back and forth. Check out the Swapping FAQ.- Unsuggestions. Get fantastic (and humorous) UnSuggestions. Did you know, for example, that Mason-Dixon Knitting is the top UnSuggestion for The Satanic Verses, Peter Pan, AND Paradise Lost?**** (Yeah, we've got Suggestions too.)
- Organizations use LibraryThing. Browse the library catalog of The Uganda Revenue Authority (really!), the Weather Museum in Houston, Texas, The Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Memorial Library, The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in NYC, and numerous churches, schools, businesses, and other institutions. Read more about Organizational accounts.
- LT Authors. Browse through the library of Joe Hill, Elizabeth Bear, or one of the 562 other authors who showcase their personal books on LibraryThing. The 20th-most popular LibraryThing author is Tim's wife, Lisa Carey, author of Every Visible Thing. If she ever loses that spot, the Zeitgeist will magically start showing the top 21. Check out all LT Authors.
- Photomosaics. See all your covers to make a photomosaic or a poster of them.
- Blog widgets. You can show off your library on your blog with our blog widgets. Or make a search widget, and people can search your library right on your blog.
- Author gallery. Your author gallery displays pictures of all the authors in your collection. LibraryThing members have uploaded more than 12,645 pictures so far.
- LibraryThing in your language. LibraryThing is available in 30 different languages; the translation is done entirely by members.
Statistics. Check out your stats page for a list of books that you share with exactly and only one other member.***** Ah, your soulmates.- Helpers log. Watch other members as they combine works, authors, and tags, add author pictures and links, and more. In the past 24 hours, the Helpers log recorded 1,860 different actions.
Buy Swag. Cafe Press has a LibraryThing Store, with t-shirts and so forth. We sell everything at our cost—even the thong.
Next week Casey, Christopher and Abby are coming up to spend the week brainstorming, coding and playing miniature golf. We plan to tackle some big topics and make some big changes. We'll let you know how things are going, and move the conversation onto Talk as much as possible.
Credits: Photo by Rachael (chamisa flower on Flickr), a runner up in last year's birthday book pile contest. More cakes appeared in this Talk post :)
*If "beta" gives us license to do whatever we want, this can only help. "We think" because Tim started this as a hobby, and didn't keep track of it. The first blog post was on the 29th, but the site itself may not have been opened until the next day. Some of the early blog posts are a hoot now. I didn't even think of "social features" for a week. [Tim]
**If each tag was 54 feet long.
***or saw once and forgot, or knew but don't care, or know and care, or...
****I had a hilarious common thread/yarn joke to go with that, which Tim gave a resounding "boooooo."
*****"Vous et nul autre" is one of the more debated phrases used on the site. (It is also one of the most unlikely to change! [Tim])
posted by Abby at 10:37 PM
21 Comments:
Bravo!
Happy birthday!
I have to say, though, that I was misled by this comment and disappointed when I realized it wasn't anything new: "Find out what your friends are reading. Connection News...." Couldn't you add date read and date started to the connection news so we can actually see what they're reading?
>Couldn't you add date read and date started to the connection news so we can actually see what they're reading?
99% of users don't use that field. I think it will get better when we add collections, specifically "currently reading."
Yeah, but a lot of members came to the site once and went away again. There's a thread somewhere where people list how they view their catalogue, and those fields were one of the most popular.
/talktopic.php?topic=16531
In particular, I count 8 of 32 posts saying that they sort by date read/started at least sometimes (and that's with some of the posts being things like "#14, 19 Firefox does too", so 32 is too high). So the regular users certainly use that field.
I'm sure I'll love "collections" -- but right now I don't know what that means/is going to mean. Can you point me to the relevant discussion?
Thanks, and Happy Birthday!
My stat for median/mean book obscurity is 2/94. Have no idea where that places my library in terms of the levels of obscurity of other LThingers. Can I find out?
Glad to have joined before the 1st birthday and to keep on being impressed by the site.
Happy Birthday!
Soooo when are you going to add the magazine feature *G* (nag, nag)
Ta
Carol
Happy birthday!
Zoe, I didn't post on that thread about sort order, but I resent the implication that if I don't use "date started/date finished" I must be an easily-dismissed one-off user. *Some* of the regular users use that field. I know it's your personal favorite, but that doesn't mean it's the bright line between Real Users and One-Offs.
The Zeitgeist backs me up here -- of the ten largest libraries (excluding CovenantNetwork as a non-personal library), only two *ever* have the date-started and date-read fields populated; one of those has them filled in once, the other about thirty times, out of some 9000+ books. (Based on the dates it looks like they played with it when the feature was introduced, then lost interest, and didn't go back and fill in dates for everything they'd previously read.)
The simple fact is that I entered the vast majority of my books before those fields were available, *read* the vast majority before I entered any of them, and really don't feel like trying to reconstruct when I read everything.
I admire your dedication in doing so, but I think you overestimate how common it is among heavy users.
I could drum up some more detailed stats, but I think it woudl be a waste of time. The feature-implementation I'm ambivalent about, but the desire underneath it I'm not. Having a "currently reading" collection will satisfy much of that idea. Depending on how we do it, I'm think it could be tied into the previous system implicitly. Add something to "currently reading" and the date started changes. More to think about there.
>we do not have an anthem.
HEY! What about "I want my LT(B)"?!?!
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that all regular users either like those fields or should be dismissed. I know that some people use those fields and others don't; the point I was trying to get across was that the ones who do use the fields are not absolutely insignificant, which seemed to be what Tim was saying. The statistic "99% of people don't use this" is completely useless.
Why are there less than half as many copies of Deathly Hallows than of any other Harry Potter book even though it broke all sorts of sale records? I think the assumption has to be that half of the people who catalogued one HP book just didn't come back to LT. Plus there's a difference between coming back occasionally to catalogue some more books and coming back regularly enough to record each book as you start and finish it. So the number of potential users of those fields is much smaller than the total membership number listed on the zeitgeist, and that should be taken into account before dismissing a significant fraction of the active users as negligible.
The currently-reading idea is interesting. I'd like the option to update the date started and finished fields automatically, but I wouldn't want to be forced into it.
Happy birthday LT, and thanks for a great site.
In an attempt to get a more accurate idea of what regular users do, I chose a long thread (the Tag Mirror one) and actually checked the catalogue of each poster to see whether they used the date read field. Of 54 unique posters with public libraries, 17 used it, 30 never used it, and 7 used it very rarely. So 17/54, or 31%, of active users do use that field. I think that's significant.
(Yes, I spent half an hour doing that. It seemed reasonable at the time.)
So 17/54, or 31%, of active users do use that field.
Doesn't follow. "Active users" and "posters in a thread about a new feature" are not the same thing, not by any means.
I spend a lot of time (some might say, "too much time") in Talk, and it sure seems as though a smallish group of people account for a large amount of the posts there.
It's quite possible to be an active user of LT and never visit Talk, or to spend your time there without visiting "site business"-related groups.
(I'm not saying that your request isn't valid, simply that your method of determining what "regular users" do wasn't.)
I did consider including some more discussion of method in that post--I guess I should have.
I know my sample doesn't include all types of LT users, but I think the more important issue is, Is there any correlation between whether an active user uses Talk and whether they use the date read field? I.e., by only considering users who posted in Talk, are my results skewed one way or the other? I don't think so, but I'm open to hearing why they might be.
The more troublesome part is whether the users who visit "site-business"-related groups in particular are very different from the average active user. I actually thought Site Talk seemed like one of the best places to get a wide sampling of users, but maybe not.
Is it me????? I cannot find the group, "Art is Life" unless I drive myself nearly to the point of giving up! It's a lovely group. *****Is there anywhere groups are alphabetic? Why isn't it on my "My Groups" list?? Please excuse tone. . . I'm hot and frustrated! Esta1923
On the groups page there's a link to an alphabetical listing. The Art is Life group also shows up in the Most Active Talk list currently. I'm not sure why it's not on your "My Groups" list--maybe try adding it again?
I thought about using the date fields to indicate starting or even just acquiring books and quickly decided that I really don't want to bother. I find it to be a very unimportant feature and I do use talk amd I do read a lot of books - probably at least a hundred since the first of the year.
BTW, Happy Birthday, LibraryThing.
Tricia
Happy 2nd Birthday, LibraryThing! Two years went by really fast. Thanks for all the great new features that keep popping up.
It was quite a cool surprise to see my picture here today! :-)
I congrat u lations!
Keep it up
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