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!