dowadi's dashboard

Not conkers; bonkers. Here's why.

The discussion around Marc's idea for a group has taken place partly in the comments, and partly via GoogleGroup he set up. The Google Group is partly meant to provide automatic group-wide communication, and a bit of privacy.

As Ricky & others have suggested regarding private messaging, there's value in having that feature. But what if you took it an order of magnitude beyond that and set up semi-autonomous spaces like a GGroup, within the site? In other words, ISoWish Groups, where something like a bulletin board, IM or mail group could function without needing a second subscription to some other service.

What's so bonkers about it? Well, I suspect it's a huge increase in overhead for the site, a lot more work creating and managing. And it's bonkers to even contemplate it at the moment.

But let's say someone comes along that wants to expand the capacities of the site in a whole new direction. ISoWish groups would be at the top of my list.

I'm moving this across from my profile comments, partly because I forgot to see if it's been fixed already:

I said: I so wish that i had known about 'draft' status 11 hours ago because I have a list of wishes that I don't want to publish just yet, and draft status is just the ticket! A wish fulfilled before I asked for it.

Perhaps I could add a wish for a publication timer.

PS: I'm not entirely sure the draft option works. I tried to save something as a draft and it looked like it got published. Will have to try some test drafts to see what happen

Stef said: Hi! Are you making wishes in draft so that they are private and just for you to see or do you intend on publishing them at some point? Just thinking we might need a "Secret" wish category.

I said: Hi Stef. Mainly, they would be published at some point. I have several ideas on the go, but want to refine each, and maybe publish them in a sequence. So it would be nice if the site provided that functionality, even though I could keep a txt file on my desktop to accomplish the same thing.

But y'know, it would also be nice to have a 'share with friends only' option. It might even be nice to have a 'secret gift' category where people can anonymously wish things for others.

The two biggest issues seem to be about extended comments and private messaging. If you've been tracking people's comments you'll know that already, so maybe I'm just committing what you already know to 'paper' for others to see.

At least four people have been caught out (me included) when comments start getting bumped from the first page. There's nothing that clearly indicates a second, ...nth page. And the existing link is below the comment box, which I took as an indication that it linked to site-wide comments. What I would prefer is a series of numbers and arrows top and bottom of the comments list. I would also ask that the subsequent pages be ordered in the same manner as the front page. Currently front page is oldest on top, but the subsequent pages have newest on top.

Private messaging seems to have come up about five times. People wanting to swap emails or phone numbers privately and securely are looking for a way to do that within the site.

I'd also like to see a way of adding karma when I like someone's wish. Does favouriting add karma? When someone makes a wish I relate to, I want to boost that wish and/or that person. Currently I can add karma in a comment, but what about a wish itself?

I have had some difficulties with embedding video, and I'd like to know if maps can be embedded in both wishes and comments. They generally want an iframe, but perhaps there's a better way.

It's pretty clear that people aren't intuitively finding their way here. I'm not sure whether that's a fixable problem. The link is there on every page....

It's also pretty clear that tags aren't being used much. Damn! Can tags be embedded in the RSS feed? That way they might get into peoples consciousness.

Last but not least I hope you are taking 'appropriate' time off. I bet this is a really exciting project, and hard to let go of, but for one person to deal with all the coding etc, and an expectant parent as well .... sheesh!

It looks like friendship requests only show up in a couple of places - like my dashboard and profile. Can they be sent out as notices to my email account?

I'm thinking that people with similar ideas might want to connect with each other. Using tags is one way of doing that, but it might be good to have groups as well. If a wish group could define itself through special tags or categories, and if those tags could be listed on the front page, it might prompt people to connect.