On Feb 4, 2006, at 8:20 PM, Chris Lott wrote:
I'm really curious why no one who asks for alphabetical sorting posits a SPECIFIC use-case scenario. I mean, on the surface I understand why people ask for this, but then as I think about it I begin to wonder what the point really is. In the context of this specific request, you talk about podcast links/links referred to in the podcast. I'm not sure I understand how alpha-sorting applies. Do you tell people to go and look at the posts beginning with "P"? I would expect that, were I to go to your del.cio.us links, I would find links tagged for your podcast and with additional subject tags. I would expect to see newer links first. What SPECIFIC need does alpha sort provide? Or maybe I'm listening and I know there was a link mentioned that had the word "wikicities" in it-- would I go and browse alphabetically for www.wickicities.com? or the title where the word is probably not the first word in the title anyway?
People think alphabetically. If they go to a list which they aren't familiar with, they want to assign some kind of order to it. Right now, it's not clear to someone who isn't entering links on delicious what that order is. If I mention "MemoryMiner" in my podcast, they'll probably look for a link title starting with "M". If they can't find it, they might then go and look for the tags on the right, assuming they know how delicious works or they are fairly with it and don't know but grasp the tag concept. Then they have to guess, did I do a good job of tagging it and give it tags for "mac" "software" "photography", etc, etc, which would be what they might choose, or did I just tag it with "photography" so they have to find that tag and click it?
Don't get me wrong, I love the tagging idea. I just think the alphanumeric is going to be handier for someone probably 85 - 90% of the time if they come to my delicious links page, know that I talked about Logitech AV remotes, and (rightly) guess the link will start with Logitech. If I have 10 pages of links as more episodes of podcasts take place, it just gives them the option to say, okay, I need to go another couple pages to where the L's probably are or I can use the tags if I want. Whichever makes the most sense to them.
Basically, it's NOT that hard to do. Your response is along the lines of "it doesn't have it now so it should always be that way." You can't really justify your approach either except that you don't understand it. If no one in the world had done any of the things I don't understand, we'd still be in caves. I don't accept that response.
I'm NOT Being hostile, I'm honestly curious. When I direct people to del.icio.us links I tend to do it in these ways: to a specific link to a tag I'm trying to imagine the scenario in which your users will want to browse alphabetically rather than contextually. I've never once wanted to sort my links alphabetically, so maybe it's just foreign to me. I'd either be directing my users to a specific link X, to all links about Y, or to links associated with the podcast Z--
In fact that's what I wound up doing, is just putting in Episode numbers. But that's stupid - because now my numeric tags become part of delicious and dilute the usefulness of the tags. Or at the very least, they don't contribute anything to anyone else.
At any rate, some specific examples might help make your case. So far it is pretty abstract and I'm still not seeing the utility.
I never really saw the utility in social apps until I saw things like flickr and delicious and other similar apps. Looking at things like myspace, tagworld, and others of that ilk sure wouldn't convince me. Again, and for the final time, I don't accept the argument that because you don't like it, it doesn't make sense for anyone. And that's basically the only reason not to do this any of you can come up with. If I told my clients that, they wouldn't even bother saying goodbye, they'd just be gone.
Bottom line, it's easy to implement, I really don't understand the technical reasons an alphabetical ordering of the same list would be slower (granted, I don't know anything about mySql but I guarantee in SQL Server this is a non-issue), and I have to say, why not? If my page of bookmarks was ranked in some way by meaning usefulness, that would be one thing, but it's not. It's ordered chronologically, in reverse order. Why? Is the last thing I entered more meaningful to me than the first? Who made that decision? Not I.
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