Entry tags:

usage polls

So, Mark's been working on the backend for our eventual photo/image hosting offering, and soon it will be time to create the frontend. (Which, as any backend programmer will tell you, is totally the not-fun part, and as any frontend programmer will tell you, is totally the fun part.) As we've been thinking about the design of how we should allow uploads and how we should handle the resulting photos, we've both started thinking that we could do some really awesome things with making images in your space function like entry-like objects, instead of the nearly-entirely-disconnected things they are in LJ's Scrapbook.

So, for instance, in addition to specifying security, you might also choose to allow commenting directly on the image, manage the comments on the image (screening, deleting, freezing, etc), send the image directly to your journal's front page (only if you wanted to, of course!) and have it appear on your readers' reading pages, tag it (and have it appear in your journal when people view that particular tag's list of uses) -- things like that. (I know people will be tempted to ask questions and offer suggestions at this point, but please, hold them -- we'll be coming back to y'all once we have a more firm idea of how we're going to handle things, preferably with things like sketches and workflows and the like for you to give specific opinions on.)

But, my point in posting here was, I got to thinking about other things that might be able to work the same way. And then I started thinking: what if we hooked the concept of advanced reading filters into this concept? Imagine how awesome it would be, for instance, if Alice could bundle together all her Twitter updates or Twitter import posts into one type of update, and Bob, who loves the essays Alice writes but thinks Twitter updates should die a firey death, could set his subscription options to "show me everything from Alice except twitter imports". Or, say Charlie posts gorgeous photos that Donna loves, but hir entries are all about a fandom or hobby Donna doesn't share and is actively repulsed by: Donna could only subscribe to Charlie's photos. Or say that Eva is an mp3 blogger who posts five awesome tracks per day and lovely analytical essays about why she chose those tracks and what they mean to her, but in between the mp3s and the essays, she also giant photos consisting of the album cover art for the tracks she's posting, and Fred (the poor guy) is still on dialup, or is usually surfing from his phone, and downloading huge images is a pain: Fred could subscribe to everything in Eva's account but the images.

I'm totally thinking out loud here -- this is the kind of idea we've been tossing back and forth for a few weeks -- but one thing became clear: once we started thinking of the possibility, we realized there were potentially all kinds of things people might want to include in their DW accounts that aren't "entries", so to speak, but are still some form of content that people might want to share. I started making my own list, and then I thought, you know, some of these "object types" will be more popular than others, and I'd like to know a rough shakedown on how popular those things will be before we even get to the design phase. (As any good programmer knows, it's best to have a full spec at the very latest before you start designing the interface, or else you'll make bad interface design choices.)

So, behind this cut is a poll. The checkboxes for each question are all the things I could think of off the top of my head that somebody might want to put in their DW account (with some help from the #dreamwidth irc channel!) There are four questions:

* Which of these things would you possibly be interested in posting in your own DW account?

* Which of these things would you absolutely not be interested in posting to your DW account?

* Which of these things would you be interested in reading from somebody on your reading page? (Assume the person posting it is at least a friendly acquaintance, and the quality of whatever thing we're talking about is high: gorgeous photos, music that exactly fits your interests, etc.)

* Which of these things would you absolutely not want to see from someone on your reading page? (This is the type-of-content you would want to automatically filter out whenever subscribing to somebody new.) Again, assume the person posting is at least a friendly acquaintance, and the quality of whatever thing is high.

Each question has a "something else, see comments" tickbox. If you tick the tickbox, please leave a comment with two pieces of information:

* The type of content you have in mind that I haven't thought of yet;

* Which of the categories the content belongs in. (There should be two answers there: whether you'd be interested in posting it, and whether you'd be interested in reading it. Please answer both!)

I'm experimenting with anonymous polling, so while everyone will be able to see your votes, nobody will be able to see who you are. In other words, each poll response will appear to come from an anonymous user, but you'll be able to see that anonymous user #1 voted for 3, 5, 8, and 9, while anonymous user #2 voted for 1, 2, 5, and 7.