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: general

Today 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: general