Beta site

The beta site is now live at :

www.betalistal.com/ (You have to login to see anything)

The first update is a new homepage which has the new promoted items feature and a feed of updates from friends.

The promotion works by promoting a item when it reaches 2 votes and then it can be bumped to the top again at 5 and 10 votes.

Known issues :

- Missing sections e.g. new people, collection stats, your updates 'Activity', friends

- Only able to view the first 5 items of a group (e.g. xxxxx posted 12 images)

- Missing counts for 'My content'

- Missing ability to filter types of updates (e.g. do not display ratings)

- Missing feed privacy options

Complete :

- Pagination of promoted items and feeds

Thanks it's fun to see what people are doing, I've added pagination for the updates and promotions now.

No sure I see the point of the 'My Stuff' links when there's a menu right on top of it.

hm, frankly, i don't really care what my friends are adding to their collections as in a "feed" fashion. i'd really like if this would be optional as i don't like this feature at all. i'd like generally more customization of the "home page" like in Xing for instance, where you can choose which components should show up there.

what is promotion and how is it enabled?

Well the feed function itself will be customizable so you can choose which information appears there, so for example if you only wanted to track reviews you can. You will also be able to choose to view updates from the entire site or just friends.

ok, the feed is (if at all) more interesting from the entire site (like it was in Listal once) than from my friends. i'd really like it though if i could disable it altogether.

No sure I see the point of the 'My Stuff' links when there's a menu right on top of it.

I agree that it's redundant but I think some people get lost without a clear set of links to the main areas.

ok, the feed is (if at all) more interesting from the entire site (like it was in Listal once) than from my friends. i'd really like it though if i could disable it altogether.

Why? and what would you want to see on the homepage idealy? (or do you want no change from the current one?)

The promotion system works by promoting an item to the top of the list when it reaches a certain amount of votes.

Also forgot to say that (like facebook) you be able to choose which updates you post to the feed.

ah, thanks for explaining promotion. what exactly is the number of votes that will trigger a promotion?

i don't like it because i don't really care about every single item that my frineds update. one of my friends for instance is coroner, who is involved in thousands of items. i really don't want an update of that. if i want to compare or even look at his work until now i just click his profile and select what i want to llok further into. but then again, that's just me.

but i'd really like something where you can define in your preferences which "box" you want on your homepage like:

homepage consists of:
[ ] Friends feed
[ ] Entire site feed
[ ] Recent Reviews
[ ] Recent Lists
[ ] New Users
[ ] New Items
[ ] Recent group threads
[ ] New Comments
etc.

depending on what i select there i'd get a customized homepage.

I don't like people being able to customize the homepage because I lose the ability to redesign the homepage in the future.

For example if I launched a new feature and I wanted to promote it on the homepage I can't do that anymore. If I want to change the focus of the site I can't do that anymore, for example the current redesign changes the focus more on featuring added content and discovering new content.

I lose control of the user experience because one persons experience may be completely different to mine if they have customized it, they may add too much stuff and make the homepage really slow etc...

you could make it like in Xing: you have one "framework" where there are some obligatory components that show up at every users homepage. then there are some slots for customization, with those slots being limited, to lets say 3 or 4. so you don't get users who load every single "module" and still are able to promote or enforce certain elements on the page.

Once that's in place I'm still limited in what I can change, for example if I want to change to a more complicated layout or merge a few modules into one long horizontal bar. I try to follow this as much as possible :

www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/outsourcing_choice.php

One thing that might be possible is a separate customizable page

ok i see. hm, at least for me a separate page would take out the sense of a customizable _homepage_. i'd be happy as long as i can at least disable certain elements from your master design.

in the friends feed you see for instance that a friend posted 10 pictures of John Doe, and all those pictures are shown together in one block and also every picture has a link beneath it, but why isn't there one link to the whole item (for instance an actor or movie etc.) those pictures where added to in this block?

Yeah that would be nice, at the moment though though it would be slower to get that information otherwise I would probably just add that in.