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!

…and now we have one.

A few updates were pushed out to the site yesterday:

1. “Remember me” checkbox under the login - yes, at long last. If checked, it will remember you when you come back to the site, and you won’t have to log in again. That was annoying me as much as it was annoying you.
2. Wish stats - We don’t have a lot of statistics… two, in fact. But it will help give you an idea of where we’re headed. If you click on the details of an item, for example the Apple iPhone, you’ll see what percentage of people who have/want it are male vs. female, and the average age of people who have/want it. Right now it’s plain text, but eventually we’d like to make it more graphical. The idea is that having this type of information will help you decide if a given item is a good gift for someone. John and I also hypothesized about what a guy would think if he added something to his list and noticed 95% of the people who want it are female. Would it change his opinion of it? Maybe it’s just a novelty, but we have a lot of ideas like this.

More to come…

While we’ve been working on getting the features necessary for launch ready, I’ve been putting in minor enhancements and fixes based on my own personal use of the site, as well as feedback from our beta testers. Just as a quick summary:

1. You can now just hit the “enter key” in Internet Explorer to login. No need to click the button anymore (unless you want to). That one was for you, Kate.
2. There is now a feedback link at the top of the page so you can quickly and easily submit beta feedback. Providing your e-mail address is optional, and is only required if you want us to write you back. All feedback is welcome - we want to make giving it as easy as possible.
3. There were some small changes to the profile page, although expect it to get a full overhaul before launch. In particular we’ve added the ability to see people’s favorite stores (gift card ideas?), and you can see a user’s gift mailing address only if they have marked you as a friend. The privacy model we’re going with for that is the same as the model for marking stuff as “bought” off of someone’s list. If you add someone as your friend, you trust them to see your mailing address. How else can they send you gifts? Of course, like most stuff in your profile, entering that address is optional - you can put in as much or as little detail as you like.
4. More details on items. If you added something from Amazon, or you added something from another store via the browser button and matched it with an Amazon item, you can now see the Amazon description under “more item details” (that may be renamed). Sometimes Amazon puts a lot of great stuff in the description. For example, click “more item details” on the Brown Zune.
5. New window around the browser button. This changed around Christmas, but if you haven’t clicked your Wishlisting browser button in a while, give it another go. It is now a floating window that you can drag around if you want. The reason we changed it was primarily because sometimes the window would get in your way, and you couldn’t double-check the price or see other parts of the screen that you might have wanted to verify that everything is correct.

I’ll keep you all posted as things change. Feel free to send feedback via the new link!

For those of you who didn’t guess the URL, it is http://beta.wishlisting.com. It should now fully support Internet Explorer. Please play around with it and send us bugs! You can send e-mail to beta at wishlisting.com, or just add a comment to this blog post. Eventually we’ll probably have a formal “log a problem” link on the site.

Major things that we know are busted:

• Searching for a new thing to add to your list is slooow. Searching your own list, a friend’s list, searching for people, etc should be reasonably fast. Let us know if it isn’t.
• We need a proper front page, privacy policy (”we don’t sell your personal info”), and terms of service (”don’t screw with the site, and don’t sue us”).
• The browser button is a huge pain to install and use in Internet Explorer. Firefox isn’t perfect either, but it’s better. We are aware of those issues and plan on rectifying them. The descriptions for how to install them now are improved, but still not great. If you have problems, feel free to e-mail me and I’ll walk you through them until we get solid instructions up.
• Our host still kills our processes once in a while. I’m not sure what activity is causing us to blow out of memory, but I’m trying to find out. If you use the site, you might cause it to happen with more frequency - that would help us figure out what’s going on.

We have a ton of features planned, which we’re not ready to talk about just yet. Our focus is to make sure the site is stable and functional at the moment. However, if you have any suggestions for features by all means send them to us!

When we’re confident that the site is stable and usable, we’ll move it over to wishlisting.com proper. All of your data will move along with it, so feel free to use it in a realistic way.

There were two interesting articles over at PC world talking about the problem with current price comparison engines.

From Protect Yourself While Using Web Shopping Tools:

Most shopping engines are biased toward companies that pay them fees for prominent placement.

Shopping engines don’t always report the most comprehensive list of products… because merchants often remove low-margin and low-cost items from the product catalogs they share with shopping engines…

And from Shopping Engines: Suspect Advice?:

Nearly a third of the merchants that came up in our searches for popular consumer electronics on Yahoo Shopping, for example, had “unsatisfactory” ratings with the BBB.

I’ve been reading quite a bit about the comparison shopping space and there appear to be a lot of areas for improvement.

Over Thanksgiving break we updated the top banner so that it was both prettier and more usable, which was one of the things preventing us from going beta.  One of the other big ones is IE support, which we’re still working on.  A lot of the problems have been resolved due to us adding some tables for layout to prevent quirky CSS bugs, and a number of bugs were fixed dealing with image uploads, etc.  It’s nice to see some of the CSS problems we were having appear to be resolved in Internet Explorer 7.

For those of you who read Digg, you may have seen this article about Media Temple. If you’ve come to the site and found it down, or seen a bunch of errors pop up, it’s quite likely due to the fact that our host has had some serious stability problems lately.  Sometimes the whole server is down, sometimes the database… lots of various problems.  We were one of the customers who was given 2 months’ free hosting for our troubles, but needless to say, the stability concerns us.  It probably won’t stop us from going to public beta, but it’s certainly one of the things we’re going to have to think hard about before the ultimate launch.

The Paradox of Choice is on my reading list for a number of reasons. One of them is that when I’m shopping for, say a digital camera, sometimes I’ll use one of those price comparison sites to find the lowest price… and I’ll end up with something like this (site to remain nameless):

The lowest price it lists is $351 at a store called Butterfly Photo. There are 51 other options. I understand that a purchase decision involves more than price, which is why for each store they offer ratings of merchants, reviews, shipping and tax breakdowns, etc. You end up with an overwhelming amount of information on each store, and a good chunk of options that are wholly inferior to other options. For example, is anyone really going to consider buying this camera for $535.77 from a store called Compuvest? Similarly, an eagle-eyed reader might notice that Amazon.com isn’t included among the options. It happens to be available there for $361, and there’s a 5% off electronics coupon today.

So, for people who are really worried about getting the best price, do they have to visit multiple shopping engines? Multiple coupon sites? How much trouble is it worth to save $10 on a camera? This is the kind of thing John and I have a lot of discussions about. What do you think?

We didn’t actually plan on having an ‘alpha’ release of Wishlisting.  However, a few enterprising friends did some URL hacking and found the live test site we’ve been working with, and started using it.  Special thanks to Shuttle and Kate for all of the bugs they’ve sent in.

There are a number of outstanding issues, a subset of which are preventing us from going into real beta.  Namely:

• Our IE support is weak.  We have various hacks in there to work around CSS, PNG, and compressed JavaScript issues in IE, but there is still much to be done.  Since most people in the world use IE, we really need to make sure that works (John will likely eventually write an article about the frustrations involved in that).
• There’s a big difference between something that “works” and something that’s “done”.  For example, something that works lets you add stuff to your wishlist, and work with the basic functionality of writing reviews, adding friends, etc.  Something that’s done has a privacy policy, terms of service, a front page with actual graphics, etc.
• Our host shoots us sometimes.  We’re running on the MediaTemple GridServer so that hopefully we can grow without having to worry too much about hardware.  The rub with the Grid is that although you can theoretically scale across machines and use lots of CPUs, etc… you can’t use lots of memory.  Currently, if our process uses more than 64 MB of RAM, they’ll kill us.  I fully expected us to grow out of 64MB, but I didn’t expect it with only a handful of alpha users… so there’s definitely something wrong.  Periodically functionality will stop on the site because they’ve killed one of our processes.

Our alpha testers have found a lot of great bugs that were important to fix before going live, including Dan, who immediately started in with the SQL injection attacks.  Kate found a great bug with the images we import, as well as a ton of usability problems.  Shuttle seems to have a knack for performing just the right actions to get MediaTemple to kill our processes.  We’re knocking down problems as fast as possible, but there is a good bit of nastiness left.  Thank you to all the Alpha testers for helping us minimize the unknown unknowns.

Last night John and I sat down and went through the site to determine how far we are from being able to go beta.  We played around with all of the sites most common features, nitpicked various areas of the experience that we didn’t like and/or were broken, and logged about 30 bugs.  Although a beta is used to some extent to find bugs, people shouldn’t have to run into obvious bugs during a beta.  They’re supposed to find the “hard” bugs.  The ones that come up because they’re using IE7 with some pop-up blocking toolbar on a release candidate of Windows Vista.  They shouldn’t have to suffer through much in the way of totally predictable mainstream problems.

So… this weekend is going to be a lot of bug-squashing and test case writing.  We want to get the beta out though… soon!