Wishlisting Blog

On Tuesday we switched servers back to the grid, and released a substantial update to wishlisting.

Here’s a rundown of the new features you’ll find:

• Updated look - The images were re-formatted to pop off the page, and the layout of the site now makes better use of the browser’s screen real estate. The comments and discussions were totally updated with a sexier look. There are a lot of little graphical updates all over the site.
• Far better information on an item - This was the biggest overhaul. When you click on the details of an item, you can see who else wants/has it right on the home screen. Also, if there are changes in price, that too is visible right on there. We do automatic price-checking for quite a few stores. As we see people adding wishes at various sites, we add price checking support for them as well.
• Tools page - Instructions for installing our browser tools, fully illustrated.
• Browse all popular items - You might not have noticed, but the filter buttons at the top are now active on the home page. If you start playing with them, you can explore the most popular things on the site. For example, if you go to the home page and choose the “stuff people want” filter, you’ll get back all of the most popular stuff on the site that people want.
• Email notifications - By default, you’re notified when a friend leaves a comment on one of your items now. There are a bunch of new settings to allow you to control what you get e-mailed about, and how often. You can even set it up to only notify you weekly with a summary of all of your comments, for example.
• “Stuff I have” no longer hidden - One of the things that often confused people is that when they marked something as “I have it” it seemed to disappear. This is because, by default, your wishlist was only showing stuff you want. The new default is to show it all, in two different groups. So, you can see what happens more clearly when you move stuff from “I want it” to “I have it”.
• Customize the default view of your wishlist - Anytime you change the filters on your wishlist, you can “freeze” that view as the view you want when you come look at your wishlist by default. So, if you don’t like seeing both your “want it” and “have it” items all the time, you can just filter on “want it” and you’ll see an option in the left-hand side to set that as your default view. That view will only apply to you when looking at your own wishlist. It will not affect what other people see.
• You can control when someone finds out about a gift purchase - When you reserve an item for someone, now you can tell the site when that person is allowed to see that information. You can choose to never tell them, tell them on their birthday, or pick any date of your choosing. When that date rolls around, they’ll get an e-mail (if they want one) and they’ll be able to see, on their wishlist, that the item has been reserved.
• Items reserved for you are separated out - When you look at someone’s wishlist, there is a separate group of items that the person “wants” but have been reserved for him/her. So, it’s immediately obvious what’s left to buy, and what isn’t. When the person looks at his/her own list, they may see a smaller set of items here, however. We don’t ruin surprises for people. The buyer controls when the recipient finds out about a purchase.
• New gifts given/received tables on your profile - You can track what gifts you’ve given and what you’ve received right on your profile page. No one can see this but you. When someone reserves something for you, we have added a new field for “where did you buy it?” which will also show up in this table. That way, if you need to return something, you can see where the person bought it without having to ask them.
• Help section - If you get stuck, you can come here for help. We’ll be updating it with more pictures eventually, and we’ll update the contents depending upon where people need the most help.
• See consolidated reviews - There is no need to go to each person’s wish to find out what they think of an item, there is a new “reviews” link where you can see all reviews of an item.

Almost all of these changes were motivated by feedback from our beta users - so thank you! There is a lot more to come. Please play around and send feedback with any comments/ideas/insults/thoughts you might have.