On 2/5/06, Scott Willsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [feature requests for better sorting and search mechanisms, including alphabetical sorting]
> On Feb 4, 2006, at 8:20 PM, Chris Lott wrote: > > 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 But title makers are not well behaved. > 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? Likewise, did the content provider create a meaningful title? If they did not, did you? Will your user think of the same title? How do people search for books in libraries? > 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. Responses are more along the lines of asking for use-cases, from what I read. My own response is agnostic. I want to see your use-cases, I want to know: if the feature is there, will it be used? Is it being used in other sites?* Real-estate is precious. Don't clutter. * there aren't other sites exactly like del.icio.us, but there are bound to be places with enough similarity and enough data collected on actual user behavior. (not just websites. libraries, email clients, file systems, &c.) > 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. e.g. I'd like to have different sorting options. I wouldn't use alphabetical, but I might use reverse chronological order*. Perhaps the behavior of listing files in a directory is similar, if there are multitudes of files (say, log files with different types (types would correspond to a tag) of logs). >From my naive point of view, what to do is a combination of speculation, anthropology, and project management. Consider physical anthropologists who want to speculate about how things were done in the past (we're just looking to the future instead). Their thoughts can be informed by cultural anthropology or forensics--how do groups behave now, how similar are the settings, how do things decay in these environments, &c. Orthogonal to this is project management--you have a huge set of enhancements and fixes. You have to rank them somehow. Which get done first? The reactions to your feature request, the skepticism, aren't hostile. They are pragmatic. But maybe I've misread things, since I can only speak for myself. * btw, I'm sure someone must have considered list recency and primacy effects with respect to recall? anything interesting from that which informs this discussion? e.g. Someone haves a vague feeling that they saved something, and will possibly remember that it was close in time or far in time. at least they could partition their data based on this to do a sort or search, no? -- sheila _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
