John Manoogian III's dashboard

The rotation does not stick. This was a quick fix to help with viewing photos that were not oriented correctly. We are working on a solution that should go live this month that will make the rotation permanent. – Noah Everett, on September 09, 2008 16:48

Still not sticking. Am I missing something? I can rotate all the livelong day but it never stays spun.

If you hit the rotate buttons several times does it eventually begin to rotate? I tested it on safari 3.1.2 and it seems to work. Also do you have javascript enabled? – Noah Everett, on September 03, 2008 14:43

Safari 3.1.2

What browser are you using and also what version of that browser? – Noah Everett, on September 02, 2008 15:12

I could not agree more. – Snowflake Seven, on August 31, 2008 07:00

Thanks for this info, Otis. I still get a bit confused when using the GoodReads invite system (and other invite systems, frankly), and I do feel like it pops up too often for my taste, but I also appreciate that you have given this a lot of thought and that you took the time to write a lengthy response. If I think of any ideas or suggestions, I will definitely try to share them.

The most clear distinction I can think of is to make the "finding friends" process explicitly, visually different from the "inviting friends" process.

I don't know if this is helpful, but the way we have set it up here at Get Satisfaction is to lightly step people through three clear paths so that they don't ever get that sensation that they're about to do something they don't intend. We separated the choices a user has into "finding in our system", "inviting from outside our system", and "importing into our system".



I won't claim that this is the best way. Our "contacts" are very different from your "friends" but I offer this up in case it helps in some way. We haven't gotten complaints, but contacts in our system admittedly have less importance than friends in your system.

In any case, I'm enjoying GoodReads, especially the way it encourages me to carve out more time for reading in my life.

still sideways after hitting rotate button

Kelly: currently the rotation doesn't stick, this was just a quick fix put in place to help the viewing of photos that aren't oriented correctly. We are working on another fix that will permanently orient the photo correctly. – Noah Everett, on August 26, 2008 14:56

I am, as of today, attempting to rotate photos and it doesn't seem to be saving the rotation I choose. Is there a reason it doesn't stick or is it because they came from Twitterrific or is there a third option I don't know about? – Kelly, on August 25, 2008 16:39

Hi All,

I wanted to post an official response from the Goodreads team to this post. First off, as Jessica, mentioned - we are very sorry Micki! Address book importers are a necessary part of any social network, and we have tried very hard to adhere to industry best practices. We have a goal that nobody should ever invite members they did not intend to, so I was very concerned to read Micki's blog post.

We have been continually improving out address book inviter every since launch. In early 2008 we moved to a 2-page invite flow and added a javascript confirmation before sending invites. This double-confirm has served us well, and I invite anyone to check out our current flow (screenshot here), and give us feedback. For reference, here is Facebook's import flow.

However, given this thread we can clearly do better. I consulted a user-interface expert, who suggested that our javascript confirm might be improved, because "who reads those annoying things anyways?" (another anti-pattern?). We agreed, and just launched a much more clear confirm, using a div. We also tweaked some copy to make it more clear for members whose address book did not contain anyone already on Goodreads.

The last point, brought up by Snowflake Seven, is that trusting a social network with your email password is a bad pattern. This is certainly true, and there are examples of social networks abusing this trust.. But like any media company trying to create a brand, companies like Goodreads, MySpace, Facebook, etc would never do anything illicit, because our reputation is at stake, and to be successful we need the trust of our members.

This being said, OAuth (a way to accomplish importing your address book without giving your password to another site) is certainly the way of the future. However it is brand-new. Facebook silently launched OAuth support within the last few weeks, unless I am mistaken. Gmail's OAuth support is less than 2 months old, and Goodreads was one of the first sites to implement it (we know this from chatting with their developers). So I am happy to announce that Goodreads now does support OAuth, and are in the process of soft-launching it and testing it. You can find our Oauth support on this page, or linked to on the bottom of our invite page ("friends" => "invite friends").

Goodreads was built on a belief of listening to our members and reacting quickly, constantly improving things and adding wanted features. We'd love any further feedback people have on how we can continue to make a great service!

Thanks. Good to know. Would still be nice to be able to save rotation set by owner in case the server-side fix isn't 100% accurate. – maczter, on August 15, 2008 20:52

The server-side fix we have almost ready to deploy will do this for you. – Noah Everett, on August 15, 2008 16:45

Beautiful. Much appreciated.

Since none of us stated the obvious...can we look the gift horse in the mouth now and ask that if the owner of a given image rotates that image via the new rotate controls, that the image (and thumbnail on our home page) be saved in the new orientation so that when others view our images they will already be rotated properly? – maczter, on August 15, 2008 16:40

We've added a "rotate" photo option to twitpic.com. This will compliment our server-side auto-rotate solution once it goes live. Hopefully this works great for everyone. I've tested it on IE 7 / Firefox 3 / Safari 3.

Thanks for being patient everyone, I know this request wasn't fixed as fast as it should have been. I'm hoping to be able to devote the majority of my attention to twitpic soon.

The worst part is GoodReads doesn't just offer you the opportunity on your friends page, but rather it pops up constantly (annoyingly) all over the website. It is a bad bad thing.

Have you ever had a service email your password to you because you forgot it? Well this gives GoodReads access to read that email. The tech-industry calls it an "anti-pattern" because it trains users to turn over there password to another service. They probably aren't evil like that, but it is still a bad precedent.

GoodReads.com should take the higher road, and use positive design patterns, like OAuth, to accomplish friends-list importing without requiring your password to other services.

The Same just happened to me, what can I do to fix it! Please Help!!

The rotation issue on those photos is a twitterrific bug that they are working to fix in their next release. We aren't able to auto orient them correctly due to the bug which writes bad exif data to the images. They should have it fixed soon. – Noah Everett, on August 08, 2008 19:34