LivingSocial Blog - All

Add a restaurant now available!

2008-07-08T13:25:00Z

At long last, our most requested feature within DiningSocial is now available! The capability to add a new restaurant was launched last night. It should be a fairly simple process:

1) Search for your desired restaurant

2) If you do not see the restaurant you are looking for listed, click the "add a restaurant to our database" link that will show up on the search results page

3) This will take you to a page where you can enter in key information about the restaurant, such as cuisine type, name, address, and more

We will continue to improve the process and can't wait for your feedback to let us know how we can make the experience even better.

BrewSocial 2.0!

2008-07-03T15:44:00Z

Just a quick little note... those of you who are regular users have probably noticed a few changes to DrinkingSocial over the past few days. Well, we're happy to announce that we've released the 2.0 version of BrewSocial. We've decided to change the application's name to BrewSocial to make it crystal clear that this is all about beer! There are a few kinks that need to be worked out, but we're certain that it's a great step up in helping you manage and display your collections. Make sure to check out the new "home" page and the "manage" tab, which has been significantly updated to allow you to find more info about the activity of your friends (home page) and easily organize your collection (manage tab). As always, please let us know your feedback and pass along requests for future improvements!

DiningSocial 2.0

2008-07-01T20:23:00Z

Just a quick little note... those of you who are regular users have probably noticed a few changes to DiningSocial over the past few days. Well, we're happy to announce that we've released the 2.0 version of DiningSocial. There are a few kinks that need to be worked out, but we're certain that it's a great step up in helping you manage and display your collections. Make sure to check out the new "home" page and the "manage" tab, which has been significantly updated to allow you to find more info about the activity of your friends (home page) and easily organize your restaurants list (manage tab). As always, please let us know your feedback and pass along requests for future improvements!

Update: Leaderboard and other changes

2008-06-16T18:07:00Z

With the releases of the 2.0 versions of ReelSocial, TuneSocial, and GamingSocial, we've updated how the leaderboard rankings are calculated and the corresponding total on your profile. Previously, in the rankings, we used all items in your collection to calculate your ranking. This was often not the most accurate method, because the leaderboard is a representation of what you have done. So, if you've seen your total decrease, this is why. This change was made as the result of significant feedback from users and occurs across the board.

We'll continue to improve the leaderboard functionality in the future and provide additional leaderboard categories for you to climb up to the top!

Can't find a book? Add it!

2008-06-06T18:36:00Z

Direct links to create a book:

Facebook
ReadingSocial

We know our book database isn't perfect (although we'll never stop trying!), so we've created the ability for you to add books we're currently missing. At the bottom of each search result, you'll see a link that says "Still nothing? You can add the book to our catalog yourself!". From there, it's a simple two-step process.

1) Enter the correct information for the book onto the page (Author/Title/ISBN). ISBN is the best may to make sure there are no duplicates, so it might be worth the effort to spend the extra time finding the ISBN before you upload.

2) We'll search for potential duplicates. Confirm it is not already listed. This should hopefully help you out in case you accidentally misspelled an entry. As you can imagine, in the example I show here, Harry Potter is already in our database, so I won't choose to add it again.

We hope this lets you maintain a more accurate collection, is easy to use, and provides a better experience on ReadingSocial by letting you guys help us build an even better database.

"Follow" someone

2008-05-18T21:11:00Z

Have you found someone who has the same tastes as you? Or perhaps you think they really write great reviews? You may not know or be friends with that person, but you want to know when they add a new book or write a new review.

Last night, we pushed a new feature that allows you to "follow" another ReadingSocial user. If you choose to follow others, relevant information such as what books they've added or what reviews they've written will show up on the news feed on your home page.

To follow someone, you need to simply navigate to his/her bookshelf and click the "follow" button on the image module. As always, please don't hesitate to provide suggestions and feedback!

New Feature: Improved shelf management

2008-05-18T20:32:00Z

We've received quite a few pieces of feedback from everyone, that, when taken together, made us realize we had to provide better management tools for your shelves. Common suggestions and feedback we have received are generally around the following:

- It's not easy to delete an item from your bookshelf you have mistakenly added twice or don't want anymore
- There is no way to clear a rating
- There is no way to edit a review
- It's impossible to sort by rating or by author

Of course there are more ideas we've received, but all in all, they usually asked directly and indirectly for better ways to manage your collections. We're pleased to have recently launched a new tab entitled "Manage" that helps solve many of these problems. You'll find a spreadsheet-like interface that allows you to edit and modify most of your information right from the "Manage" page. If you get the chance, see what books you've read but are yet to review, add ratings to those you haven't read, or delete a book you've inadvertently added twice.

Beta feature: Similar Tastes

2008-05-08T14:20:00Z

Yesterday we rolled out a new feature to a limited set of people (1000 users) that surfaces people we think may have similar tastes in books to you. We try to find people with many books on their shelves that are similar to you so you'll be able to browse their bookshelves and find a few hidden gems you weren't aware of. We'll continue to refine the logic and once we've worked out a few kinks, roll out to everyone. Please leave us feedback on how you think this should work and if you're one of the lucky 1000 users who has the "similar tastes" module in the right rail of the "my shelf" page, please don't hesitate at all.

Have an iPhone?

2008-05-04T07:28:00Z

Well, I cranked out a quick and dirty / minimalist iPhone interface.

http://readers.livingsocial.com/iphone

You can only do a few things with it right now:

Search for a book and update its status (so when you hear about a great book, you can search for it and mark it was ‘want to read’).
Browse your already read, reading now, and want to read lists. If you finish a book on a park bench you can quickly update its status to ‘already read’ (all news feed items, profile updates, etc. will be posted as normal.. even if it’s not indicated on the iPhone interface).

Limitations (for the time being):

ReadingSocial only.
Must have/log in with your external ReadingSocial account (Facebook users: you will have to register for a full account and link your Facebook collection).
Not paginated… only shows a handful of books per status (i.e. only the first 100 books on your want to read list are visible). I’ll implement pagination after the first person with a big collection asks for the feature.
Must navigate to readers.livingsocial.com/iphone… I’m not going to force all iPhone users over to the new app yet since it’s just an experiment.

I was basically looking to scratch a personal itch… stick the (simpler) iPhone feature requests in the comments section here and I’ll see what I can do. I must admit, it is satisfying to be out and about and mark a book as ‘want to read’ on my iPhone and come back later and see it on my Facebook profile/news feed/etc.

News feed stories now more accurate

2008-04-30T04:19:00Z

A common complaint is that all book actions result in a generic ‘added a book’ feed item. I’ve now made the feed items less generic/more accurate… e. g. now reading, finished reading, rereading, wants to read are now all disambiguated.

Reminders are dead, long live newsletters

2008-04-29T18:39:00Z

Ok, so everyone hated the emails reminding you to update the status of books you’ve been reading for over a week. I know that it often takes much longer than a week, so I didn’t intend it to be a subtle jab re: reading speed.

I just pushed a change that implements weekly newsletters that include your current read in a matter-of-fact way (so you can update it if you need to), along with recent activity from your friends on Visual Bookshelf (along with a digest of this blog). Everyone should receive one over the next 7 days. You shouldn’t receive any more “You’re reading x, still true?” emails.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Don't you hate when a book doesn't have a cover?

2008-04-22T21:00:00Z

If you do, you're not alone. A book missing its cover is one of the more frequent problems that gets reported to us, so we've tried to create a solution that helps solve this problem. If you go to a book and see that the cover is missing, there should be an option below the cover image to "Upload cover". From there, it's a simple process to upload an image.

Additionally, if you want to upload a different cover for the book then what is displayed, you can add a second image and a small gallery will appear with the new image. With this new function, we also want to make sure we're taking care of any inappropriate content. Under "report", there is now the capability to report an inappropriate image or report copyrighted material. We will continue to do our best in making sure ReadingSocial stays as current and up-to-date as possible.

Trying to eliminate duplicates from your shelf

2008-04-16T18:04:00Z

A frustration we know sometimes occurs is when you add a book to your shelf that you've forgotten you had previously added. The underlying cause is generally because many books have multiple editions, so if you're looking at a book page that's different then the version you've already added, it doesn't reflect. We've started to try and solve this problem by doing 3 things:

1) When you do a search result, we'll try and let you know if you have a similar book on your shelf already. In the example here, you can see that I have added one version of Catcher in the Rye, but in the second and third search results we surface that a similar book is on my shelf already.

2) We use this same logic within our recommendations and no longer will recommend you something that appears similar in title to something already on your shelf.

3) On a book page, if it appears similar to something on your shelf, we'll let you know.

We'll continue to improve this process and hope to offer ways to be able to link editions in the future in a way that is intuitive and provides the best experience possible. Happy reading!

Embed your book collection

2008-04-08T13:32:00Z

For those long-time users of ReadingSocial, you may remember a feature that allowed you to embed your collection on your blog or another site. As we made changes to the product, we had to disable that feature in order to allow larger changes to work. I am happy to report that you once again can display your collection anywhere you'd like. Here is an example of my collection:

<center> <iframe src="http://readers.livingsocial.com/people/1402772/rolodex?embeded=true" frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" width="450" style="width: 450px; height: 400px; border: 0"></iframe> </center>

In order to get your widget, simply go to the "Profile" tab and switch to rolodex mode ("toggle to rolodex" on the top of your books). From there, you will see a link to embed your collection. This will generate a snippet of code that you just need to copy and paste into the appropriate place. The default size is 450px x 400px, but you can resize it by changing the width and height in the code snippet. One limitation is that, if you have an extremely large collection (over 1000 books), the widget is very slow so we've disabled the option for larger collections. We'll work to improve this and other aspects in the future.

Movies now removed from book database

2008-04-04T20:54:00Z

We've been working hard to clean up the integrity of our database. One of the most problematic items we've run into is that many books have been made into movies and sometimes those movies slip through into our database. We know this can be incredibly annoying because people will inadvertently add a movie instead of a book, and well, movies just don't belong with books anyhow!

Today we're happy to let you know that we've tried our darnedest to remove all movies from from ReadingSocial. We hope we caught everything, but just in case, we put a "report" button below each book where you can let us know if it's not a book.

Additionally, if you find anything else wrong with the book, please feel free to let us know through one of the other options on the "report" button.