Wishlisting Blog

Sorry for the long time between posts - we’ve been incredibly busy. There is quite a bit of invisible work that has to happen for a company to run, like:

• Setting up a bank account
• Putting together cash flow projections so you know how much money to put into the bank account
• Reviewing lawyerly documents like a Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
• Figuring out what we’re going to do about hosting, since The Grid isn’t working out right now
• Moving our source control and ticket system to a secure, backed-up server (thank you Dreamhost)

But, in addition to those things getting taken care of, we’ve also pushed out some of the features we’re going to ultimately have for release, and the beta testers have been playing with them and giving feedback. For those of you who haven’t poked around recently, check out…

1. The gray overlay on the bookmarklet is back. It should provide quicker feedback and look nicer, but you can still move the window around.
2. Discussions are here - there’s still some, um, discussion about them but right now people can talk about any given product, as well as the ability to comment on anyone’s item on their wishlist. The former is meant to help people talk about the items themselves (ex. “There’s a new model of this phoine coming out next week”). The later is meant to let friends talk about items amongst themselves (ex. “Why do you want a zune, don’t you already have an ipod?”).
3. Prettier thumbnails - we now store and compress smaller versions of the images for whatever you bookmark, so that when you look at your wishlist, they don’t have as many artifacts, and the page loads faster.
4. OpenID support. This currently only works in Firefox, but will be fixed for IE before launch. This feature will allow people with Open ID’s to sign up and login to wishlisting via their open id, and we won’t store their password on our server at all.

Coming soon (I’ll let you know when)…

1. The server is moving to new hardware (thank you MediaTemple), which should resolve the problems of slow searches, and slow bookmark matches
2. A real, spiffy front page!
3. Super-fun profile pages
4. Top-secret feature surprises

So, please feel free to play with what’s there and send feedback. I’ll let you know when there’s more to see. We’re still pushing for an end-of-the-month public release!