Is it just me, or are you more likely to get requests and app invites from people you don’t care about/don’t like?
It makes sense, really. I don’t want to waste my REAL friends’ time while I try out crummy apps that always default to an invite page.
ACTUALLY, it’s kind of a neat mechanism for weeding out non-friends. “Who’s [Your name here]? Whoever they are, they’ve just invited me to Werewolves one time too many!”
Well… IS it just me?
I’m hesitant to call it “Librarian 2.0 beta” quite yet (I’m still working on the most-requested feature update), but today I launched a widget gallery and the new facebook invite system, so maybe things will pick up.
Be on the lookout, librarians — In the near future I will likely be launching “subject specialist” features that will allow multiple librarians in one network, as well as volunteer selection based on subject specialty. I’m hoping this doesn’t lead to crude volunteer vandalism (ie. experts in “the ladies” and so forth [don't take it, that's mine! jk]), but otherwise am optimistic that librarians will be actually connecting to patrons in worthwhile ways (which I’m not sure has happened up to this point).
Okay, so it’s been about four days since the application launched (btw, I swear there will be non-application blog posts someday!), and things are going overwhelmingly well. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback, mostly positive. My upgrade schedule is pretty-well set, but I’m looking to see if people would do things in a different order:
Note: I get off work today at 9:00PM, and will be burning some hardcore midnight oil to get these launched as quickly as possible. Please be patient as things come into operation over the weekend. Thanks!
You can see what I’m up to by adding the alpha app — http://apps.facebook.com/fblibrariantest/
Also, look out for the open Application Data, and eventually the open source.
(Lastly, on a personal note — My packrat mentality makes it insanely difficult to weed “my” collection. Just wanted to get that off my chest.)
Okay, so it’s been a little more than 24 hours since I launched Facebook Librarian into the application directory. As of now, there’s 160 users, with 33 librarians. Only two have used the widget feature, one of those being me. So, my first and biggest goal is improving that stat. The registration form will be clearer about the widget and more encouraging, and any page that doesn’t have a widget will display the sample widget that directs you to my homepage. This will hopefully make the usefulness of the widgets more apparent.
Other things I plan to do in the next 24 hours:
One final note:
Thank you to everyone who’s been so supportive today! Especially Gerry and Ken, who have done an incredible amount of PR in the preceding 24 hours. It feels really good that the community is taking so much ownership and giving feedback.
The objective over the next few days is to turn the proof-of-concept into something that facebook-based research students will want to use, considering there’s almost a librarian for every four non-librarians at this point.
Hey, and let me know if you start getting reference questions. That would be really cool.
Thanks again everybody — this experiment has been a real blast up to this point.
Okay, so instead of working forever to add features and tweak the thing for all of eternity, I’ve decided to release the app, see how things mess up, then fix them on the fly. Sounds like a great idea, right? Well… I’ve been sitting on this idea for so long that it has to be a diamond. Okay, so try it out and let me know what you think. And keep coming back to hawidu.com, more cool stuff is on the way.
