New feature: Shared favorites

See http://www.librarything.com/profile_sharedfavorites.php?view=timspalding.

Also see blog post on Project Ocelot generally.

Fun - but not intuative, the stars look like your rating stars, it took a while to understand that 4 stars meant 4 favourite authors in common, even with the accompanying text. Maybe I'm just dim this morning.

I was expecting it as part of the connection news, didn't spot it the first time at the end of favourite authors.

I actually like it. I admit I didn't notice it until reading this post but it's not the kind of feature I'd wish to see lit up all every time I looked at my profile.

To help it be noticed, can it also be a left hand menu link in the connection news page? That seems to be an area with potential to add more social connections as we mine them?

Minor wish ~ I like that the shared favourites counts (eg, 7, 6, 5, .. etc) and ranks others by how many they have of my favourite authors. I'd like it even more if there was a auto count of how many fav. authors I have showing next to my list of names at the page top. (7 out of how many ? Counting the hyperlinked names when you have 7+names is not easy on the eyes.

the stars look like your rating stars

They look exactly the same to me. Even knowing, after reading this thread, what they were, and also, of course, knowing that I don't rate books or authors, I still thought it meant that these were authors rated the same.

Admittedly, I haven't had my first cup of tea yet today, but I still think some other symbol might be a good idea.

>4 lilithcat:

You need some methadone.

I agree that it would be nice to have this link on the Connection News page, as a central location for social activity.l

The thing about the stars is that they are already being used on the author pages to denote whether you have "favorited" that author. I think they are bigger than the rating stars? Maybe not, but anyway I guess that's why they're being used.

I like where it is located and how it is displayed.

Even though stars are used elsewhere to denote favourite authors, they don't really make sense in this context. I'd much rather have the plain text headings 4 shared, 3 shared, etc.

I agree that it would be nice if there were a count of your favourite authors at the top, and also of each person's next to their name. It means a lot more if I share 2 of someone's 4 favourite authors than two of their 25 favourite authors.

I wonder about the 1 star list, I looked at mine and J.K. Rowling added an awful lot to that list. I'm sure Pratchett, and King would do the same as well. Just wondering if a 1 star overlap is worth it or not.

A small suggestion -

for the link to the Shared favorites can you put a br tag in between the last author and the link? It wrapped on mine and I just assumed it was another author.

>Just wondering if a 1 star overlap is worth it or not.

Well, it certainly is for some. Most of my authors have nobody else as ther favorite. I'd jump to see just one.

In theory, we could sub-sort by overall popularity, so the 1-star overlaps would begin with Callimachus (just me) and end with J. K. Rowling. But it's too clever by half for most people, I think. Alphabetization has its strengths.

Tim,

I love it. "Friends" may come and go, but people with whom you share a passion for an ancient Greek, an American science fiction writer, a 19th century British poet, and an astronomer. . .!

And this time I have no trouble viewing or understanding it. 4 stars, 4 names; 3 stars, 3 names,. . .

I think the 1-star list could be very interesting if the author turned out to be one few people list.

Had this planned all along, didn't you? :-))

12> not a problem, i just noticed I share JK with like 100 people as the only author and I'm sure that will just continue to grow.

It would be worth more with _zoe_'s suggestion in #9 so that I know it is your only favourite author, as opposed to being the only one we have in common from the 100 that person x have listed.

The problem are the people who have hundreds—yes, hundreds—of favorite authors. They show up high on everyone's list. I find it very annoying. But I'm not sure how to fix it that doens't come out fiddly.

hundreds—yes, hundreds—of favorite authors

When can we get a expandable list of favorite authors on the profile page? I'd like a "see all authors" link like there is for "see all groups".

9> general agreement - I would like to see How many favorite authors I have, How many people have each as a favorite author, and how many favorite authors each mentioned user has.

Sharing favorite authors John Horton Conway (2users), Kate Wilhelm or John Brunner (3users) is more interesting than sharing Terry Pratchett (206 users)

Yeah, "favorite" doesn't mean much when you have hundreds of them. It would be nice to limit it, like top 10 favorite authors.

I don't mean I'd like a limit on how many favorite authors one can add. I should be able to have 4394 if I really want to, but showing more than a few lines of authors on the profile page begins too looks like an unruly block of ugly text.

I think there should eventually be a weighted option for the list of people who share favourite authors, one that takes into account how many favourite authors that person has and how common a favourite author is.

Option to "In theory, we could sub-sort by overall popularity"?

Or maybe see obscure authors by default, and option to see all authors?

I like it. Next step. I'd like to see a favorite books category on profiles. I think I'd put a limit on it. Maybe 50 books. That would make people think and judge what really goes on the list. Once 50 is reached if a work is to be added then a work has to be taken off. Otherwise some LTer is going to post all 14,989 of their favorite works.

In perusing one of the matches on my profile, I found one of those folks with hundreds of favorite authors. Wow. That's a lot to keep track of.

When you read more than a 100 books a year, and not every author releases a book a year . . . favorite authors can add up, even if only really tagging "real" favorite authors. At one point in time I saw something that said that I had read 999 authors (author gallery has that 999 number for me). Currently have 35 tagged as favorite authors. That's . . what, 3.5% of all of my authors read are tagged favorite? If I had 100 favorite authors that would be roughly 10%.

I'd like an even more restricted favourite books feature, with a 10 or even 5 book limit (and a matching most hated books feature, too).

I have 14 books out of 3571 rated 5 out of 5 stars. Let's see: 2 rated 0.5 stars, 1 at 1 star, 1 at 2 stars, and 3 at 2.5 stars.

Bunch of share one, all Roger Zelazny whose my fourth favorite of four at this time. So, it doesn't happened to say much for me. But it's a good idea. However, if one of my other three popped up, I'd like to see them weighted more.

Mike--I count 54 5-star ratings for you.

But I think favourite books would have to be distinct from 5-star ratings in some way, otherwise there's no point.

I think that I might find a book to be excellent and groundbreakiing and consider it worthy of five stars without adding it to an all-time favorites list.

Yes, but most are between 4.8 and 5 stars. The 14 I counted are 5 stars out of 5 stars. I didn't want to give a book I rated 4.95 stars a 4.5 rating on LT (4 and a half stars). I note the actual rating in the comment field.

Edited to add: I keep coming very close to moving the other 40 books to 4 and a half stars and leaving only the 5 out of 5 at 5 stars. Again, though, do not feel right lumping a book I gave 4.95 stars in the same 4 and a half stars as a book I gave a much lower rating. And yes there is a difference between a 4.31 book and a 4.32 book (heard this question a lot, "but why do you go so far . .. why not just call that 4 stars or 4.5 stars" - simple - at one time I had a chart that put books into categories - 1 star, 1.5 star . . . 4 stars, 4.5, 5 stars - and it just didn't help me as much to know I had 670 books rated 4 stars, as to know that, say, 50 of them are books I rated 4.20 or what have you - it is a process of finding out which authors to look at in the future; for example, there were two authors that fell into the 4 star rating. One routinely was rated 3.8 stars by me, the other routinely put out books that I would rate 4.2 stars - and that is a much bigger difference than it might look - eventually dropped the author that almost always and consistently wrote books that I personally would rate 3.8 stars). There was a mention of "that is a lot of authors to keep track of" - well, this is one of my methods of keeping track of these 999 authors.

Thanks for the clarification!

Hm. And I was going to suggest that we don't need a way to separately designate favorite books because favorite books would be the ones that are rated with 5 stars. All that is needed is a way to link the people with the same 5 star rated books together, like favorite authors.

Maybe I should clarify and say that not all books I think should be 5 or almost 5 would make it to a personal favorite/frequent reread list.

I've only reread two books, I wouldn't mark either as a favorite book.

#12 "Alphabetization has its strengths."

For one star, I would suggest alphabetizing by author, not user... or at least by author first. Currently, with the authors mixed, I have trouble finding any "unusual" authors in my list.

I don't have many two-stars, so I'm not sure what problems this might introduce for two or more.

Any chance of getting some type of formatting for shared authors on another profile?

>Any chance of getting some type of formatting for shared authors on another profile?

?

If I look at someone's profile, who shares one or more of my favorite authors, I'd like some way to see that more easily. Bolding, italic, maybe?

First of all, I like this feature. As I decided only to catalogue the books in the niche of my specialism, I now can look for shared tastes outside that specialism too. For that reason it doesn't work for me to use book ratings to show shared favourite books.

I'd like an option to show the members per book. I guess it should be standard for the (1 shared) section anyway.

The caption bar on http://www.librarything.nl/profile_sharedfavorites.php?view=kantelier shows html code.

>The caption bar on http://www.librarything.nl/profile_share... shows html code.

I'm not seeing this. What am I missing?

> 41 : Tim : The <title> tag is <title><span id="tr3570864829" class="trans">Overeenkomstoge favorieten</span> | LibraryThing</title>

mailed you a screenshot

Got it, and fixed. Thanks. I'm blind.

Indeed (but aren't we all at times?): you overlooked the same problem on http://www.librarything.nl/editcontacts.php in the same screen shot (or just didn't yet fix it)

Seems okay to me. Delay issue? Refresh a bunch of times?

OK now