The first ever 5ft Shelf newsletter went out in the last few days and if you’re not subscribed now’s a great time to signup. We’re sending the newsletter out as a monthly edition with a mix of site news, features on how to get the most from the 5ft Shelf site and general book, music and movie news.
This months edition had features on the launch of the site, the new social network and how to integrate your facebook or twitter account to 5ft Shelf. We’ve also got a few quick links to interesting blog posts, some suggested book, albums and movies as well as a round up of movements on the ultimate shelf.
If you’d like to subscribe you can use the form below:
You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time through the links in the newsletter. We value our privacy and we’re sure you do too – we will not pass or sell your email on to anyone else.
tags: newslettercategories: general
One of the most frustrating things when joining a new service is having to find all your friends over again. We appreciate what a pain this is and today we have deployed a new feature that will hopefully reduce this initial hurdle.
The Friend Importer uses your Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo address book to look for people you already know on 5ft Shelf. It works by grabbing your address book email addresses and matching them against our database. The whole process is automated and you only need to approve 5ft Shelf read access to your address book as a one off. We’ll return those people who match contacts you have in your address book and you can then follow them all in one go (or select more granularly if you wish). For those that don’t match you can opt to be informed if they do register on 5ft Shelf in the future or even invite them to join you straight away.
To get started login to your account and visit the friend importer page. Happy socialising!
Note: We’ve had to remove the Yahoo import for a few days whilst we wait for Yahoo to approve our application (which they seem to be very slow at actioning).
categories: generalToday we’ve pushed a new feature that lets you add reviews or comments to an item. Many users have commented that they love the books, albums and films they add to their 5ft Shelf so much they want to tell the world about them! Well now that’s possible and in a way that allows you to discuss the item with other users too.
You can add a comment when you’re viewing an item. We moved the page around a bit to allow the comments to take a prominent position so you’ll find the comment area right below the cover image of the item. You can choose to add a comment about the item itself (we think more of a reivew) or reply to something said by somebody else. This style of system is called threaded comments and we prefer it as it encourages discussion between site members. Generally speaking fair, reasoned points of view go down much better than self centered, egotistical arguments. Over time a rich interaction of reviews and comments builds up that nicely complements the official blurb and helps people to judge whether the book/album/movie is worth investigating further.
As well as been visible on the item page, any comments you make will appear in your (and your friends) news feeds. For example a comment I made earlier looks like this:
The comments do not go through to your Twitter or Facebook account although we may enable this if there’s sufficient demand.
Happy reviewing!
categories: generalSomething I’ve personally wanted to add to 5ft Shelf for a long time has been Facebook and Twitter integration. Today we’ve added that. Simply speaking, the activity updates you see in your news feed are pushed through to Twitter and/or Facebook when you add or remove a book/album/movie. The Twitter updates look this:
and the Facebook updates like:
To setup updates you can either visit your profile page and click the Twitter/Facebook tab, or, on the news feed page you will notice a link to setup Twitter and Facebook integration if you haven’t already. If at any point you wish to stop the updates you can do this on your profile page.
There’s been quite a few user requests for this feature so we’re looking forward to seeing how people use it. Please note at the moment the facebook integration only offers the ability to push your 5ft Shelf updates to facebook. It does not offer the ability to manage your shelf items from within facebook.
categories: generalJust before Christmas I was contacted by a Student from Nottingham University asking if she could interview me for a radio show there. They were compiling a feature on how the internet is effecting literature so 5ft Shelf seemed like a perfect candidate. There was quite a tight time limit on the interview so covering everything we wanted was quite tough. In the end we cut out the bits about music and movies to just talk about books, the most relevent part for the feature.
The resulting interview is 5 minutes long and whilst it doesn’t cover everything we do, it does provide a good overview of the site and where the idea comes from.
categories: general
New Blog
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Regular visitors may have noticed a new blog design today. The previous blog was just a holding space whilst we went live. Inevitably we became really busy post-launch and so it got pushed down the list of priorities.
Consequently it was good to finally get the time to properly design the blog how we’d like to have from the start. If you’re reading this post you’re on the new blog so we hope you like the design and find it more consistent with the main site. For those who subscribe via RSS/Atom please note the feed URL has changed to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/5ftShelfBlog
categories: generalWe’ve been a little quiet on the blog/twitter front lately and with good reason – we’ve been working hard on a lot of new features for the site. So what’s new? Well quiet a lot.
First up, the most notable change is introducing a social network. It has been by far and away the most requested feature and we’ve been desperate to get it out there for a while now. It works in a Twitter style where you follow people who you are interested and there’s no obligation on their part to reciprocate the follow. This is great for following people with similar interests who you may not know (and thus avoiding the whole should we be friends dilemma). When viewing your profile page you’ll be able to see who you are following and who is following you (you’ll also get an email when someone new follows you). The more people you follow the more interesting your news feed becomes, which brings us nicely on to our 2nd new feature. » continue reading
Mini-Shelves have been a really popular feature of the site. Essentially they allow you to pick a topic or category that your interested in (eg Golf, DIY, Cooking…) and see what the ultimate shelf would look like if it just contained items within that category. They’re a great idea if you want to check out definitive works in a certain area, find presents for people or just want to find an item of a certain type. » continue reading
One of the most common questions we’ve been asked since launching is how do I share my shelf with friends and family? It’s quite understandable – you spend a while thinking up your favourites, remember a few you’ve forgotten a few days later and then want to show the world what you’ve done. The answer isn’t quite as smooth as we’d like it to be right now but we’ve a fix coming shortly (see next paragraph). Each person gets their own unique address where their shelf lives and you can use this address to send to friends and family. To find out your address, login and click ‘My Shelf’. The address of this page will be of the format: http://www.5ftshelf.com/users/yourusernamehere (for example my shelf is http://www.5ftshelf.com/users/george). This is your page and you can send this link round to people » continue reading
categories: generalA lot of questions have been asked about how we calculate the ultimate shelf and the mini-shelves so I thought it would be worth writing a blog post to explain it all.
The ultimate shelf is the most popular items from all users’ shelves. To calculate this we take all the shelves and combine them to find the most popular items. This process can be quite complicated and often takes a few seconds due to the sheer amount of user shelves we have on the site. As we want to keep the site running quickly, it’s not feasible to perform this process every time a new visitor arrives at our site. Equally, we don’t want to wait too long between generations of the shelf or its contents will be outdated. To combat this delicate balance we use an algorithm that waits until the site is quiet to perform the regeneration. The up shot is the site stays fast but the ultimate shelf may occasionally be a few hours out of date. We think this provides the best user experience given the constraints and we hope you agree. » continue reading
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