Implement a feature similar to popwithfriends.bml

[sofiaviolet]

Title:
Implement a feature similar to popwithfriends.bml

Area:
Circle

Summary:
I loved LJ's Popular With Friends feature and would like to see a similar feature on DW, updated to work with the WTF split.

Description:
LJ's Popular With Friends feature compiles a list of accounts most commonly listed as friends by your own friends. It's a paid feature.

For Dreamwidth to implement something like this, we'd have to figure out what relationships to analyze. I suggest that the feature analyze your reading list's subscriptions. And it needs a snappy new name.

I'd also like to suggest an improvement. LJ's default was to show only the accounts popular with your friends which you hadn't friended, with the option to show all users including your friends. I would like to add the ability to filter the results by personal journal, community, and feed.

Pros
* Users have another way to find things on Dreamwidth they might want to see.
* It's nifty.
* It's probably not super-difficult to code.

Cons
* I'm willing to bet it's rather resource-intensive (since it's a paid feature on LJ).
* Someone could probably make the same feature available offsite, either now or once more export-friendly ways of listing circle data are implemented, so DW might not want to invest resources into it.

Poll #1051 Implement a feature similar to popwithfriends.bml

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
23 (59.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (5.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
1 (2.6%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (33.3%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[denise]

This feature isn't part of the LJ open source distribution, so we'd have to roll our own from ground up.

This is not at all an argument against implementing it -- I'd actually really love to see this -- just a note that our own implementation will have to be from scratch, and therefore there's tons of opportunity to do things differently, so if people have any other suggestions for how it should work, by all means leave 'em in the comments!

[cesy]

Would it be basically like a list of the people who might appear on your network page, ranked by how many of your friends subscribed to them?

Working purely on subscriptions and ignoring access sounds fairly sensible to me for this.

Grouping/filtering by personal journal, community and feed would be useful. (I figured out how to do that in the URL for my network page, but it doesn't seem to show in the navbar there, although it does on my reading page. I might suggest that later as well.)

[sofiaviolet]

Yes. (I'd just use my network page, but then you might not ever find someone who only posts infrequently, and you have no idea how many people actually subscribe to that one community whose posts you're seeing.)

I like that suggestion. ;)

[foxfirefey]

Grouping/filtering by personal journal, community and feed would be useful. (I figured out how to do that in the URL for my network page, but it doesn't seem to show in the navbar there, although it does on my reading page. I might suggest that later as well.)

Actually, this is already a bug, so no need for a suggestion!

[rho]

When we were brainstorming what to call things that have "friends" in the name on LJ, I think we decided on "popular with your network" or something for this.

[kyrielle]

I'd like to see this, but I'd also love to be able to feed it a custom reading filter and only get a popular-with-that-filter listing. Handy if you follow a bunch of people for different reasons, and only want to expand your reading in a particular subcategory. (For example, on LJ, a lot of the journals I list are college friends - I keep up with them, but their taste in reading and their interests are widely varied and, in many cases, it's only our connection that makes me interested in their lives; I wouldn't check the popular-with feature against most of them, given a choice.)

[sofiaviolet]

Ooooh, shiny.

[7rin]

*likes*