Ditto Blog

Posted tagged with 'Beta'

  1. Loads of details… and a pic

    Woohoo! We’ve had our first bit of press. OK, so it’s a bit ‘industry‘, a bit earlier than we’d planned and not entirely accurate, but you know what they say, no publicity and all that… Anyway, we thought it was a good time to fill you in a bit more on our plans for Ditto Beta. Here’s what’s coming:

    • The idea of ‘picking your favourites’ has been replaced by voting, and our topics have been replaced by charts.
    • What does that mean? Well for a start there’s no more limit on the number of things you can vote for…
    • …or against.
    • Just by voting for stuff, whether it’s your top 100 movies or the one album we should be buying tomorrow, we’ll save the votes to your profile, where you can edit, rearrange and annotate your list to your heart’s content.
    • And if you can’t find the thing you want to vote for on our chart, add it yourself, using our streamlined search engine - now featuring Oli’s amazing predictive text witchcraft!
    • Ditto Beta will be much more useful, recommending stuff based on your votes as you go along. So it’ll be incredibly easy finding exactly the type of movie, album, band, book, TV show, game… (we could go on) you’re looking for - whether it’s an all time classic or a brand new release.
    • We’ve got a brand new look and an even more user-friendly interface. Here’s a sneak preview of our new homepage:

    NewHomepage

    (click the image for a bigger version)

    • We’ve mentioned it before, but we think it’s important so we’ll mention it again - starting your own chart will be a matter of a few clicks.

    All in all, it’s quite a big leap from the Ditto we know and love - but rest assured none of the features that already exist are being lost, though it’s true, very few of them aren’t being improved.

    So, over to you. What do you think?

    Posted at 3:46 pm on 4/03/08

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    Comments: 4

  2. On second thoughts…

    OK. We’ve had a rethink (mainly due to a bit of early feedback - thanks), and we’re considering not putting your photo at the top of a chart you’ve created. Why? Well it’s like this…

    The simple reason is: you start a chart, and your picks, as they do now, live on your profile. The chart that appears under your pic - like the example we stuck on the previous post - will be the aggregate of everyone’s picks. You know, like a chart. So it’s possible that having kicked off the debate on the most romantic movies of all time, your least favourite romantic movie of all time might actually be voted to the top, and there it is, sitting under your photo.

    Under our new thinking, if you start a chart, you’ll still get the credit, your name will still be up there in lights* and people will still be able to click a link to see your original list on your profile, we’ve just toned the whole ‘ownership’ aspect. You get to start the chart off, but once you release it out there into the wild, it’s not really ‘your’ chart anymore, everyone’s allowed to vote on it (and, in fact, the more people that vote on it the more ‘famous’ it gets and the higher up our list it will go…).

    Does this make sense? That’s where we’re at at the moment anyway. Let us know what you think…

    * May not actually be in lights

    Posted at 5:04 pm on 25/02/08

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    Comments: None

  3. Make your own topics? Sure, why not?

    One thing that’s really stood out in all the feedback we’ve received is that you lot would like to be able to make up your own topics for other people to fill in. Well never let it be said we don’t listen. Below (click on the heading above to see the whole post) is a sneak preview of one of the pages from Ditto beta (it’s only a rough mock-up - don’t read too much into it), showing how it will look once you’ve created a topic.

    listHome[1]

    As you can see, Ditto user ‘Emily’ (you’re not fooling anyone, Jennifer…) has started her own topic, told us why, and kicked it off by picking her 12 favourites*. Yes, 12. That’s another Ditto blog exclusive - we’re getting rid of the ‘top 5′ restriction. In Ditto beta you’re free to pick your top one, two, three, five or 100.

    So, what do you think? Any questions?

    * Further investigation reveals that since Emily kicked it off, other users have added another 63 romantic movies, and cast over 1,000 votes for the most romantic movie of all time.

    Posted at 5:59 pm on 19/02/08

    Tags: ,

    Comments: 4

  4. Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes…

    You may have noticed we’ve eased up on adding new features and content to the site over the last few weeks. We haven’t been hibernating (though it’s a nice thought…), quite the opposite: major changes are afoot, and instead of our usual ‘add it when it’s ready’ (or, sometimes, just before) approach, we’re going to be overhauling and re-designing the whole site and launching it as ‘Ditto Beta’ in the near future.

    So what changes can you look forward to? The most obvious thing will be Ditto’s focus. Although our members will still have all the features and benefits they’re used to (and Ditto beta will both add more and refine the ones we’ve got), our primary goal is to make Ditto useful for everyone, members and casual users alike.

    We want Ditto to be somewhere people can come and both make, and get recommendations - whether it’s a new all-time favourite or just something to watch this weekend. It’s always been our intention to make Ditto the best place on the web to discover new stuff – hopefully the new changes will get us closer to that goal.

    So what do you think? Is Ditto moving in the right direction? Got any other thoughts on things we should be working on? Tell us below…

    Thanks,

    John

    PS. I’ll be back soon to explain in some more detail the changes we’ll be making, and how all our recommendation witchcraft will work…

    Posted at 2:43 pm on 12/02/08

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    Comments: 5