Hey Peter,
Inspired by GoodReads, is there a way to add a “like” and “comment” feature on my feed? I’d love that feature. Enough of my friends are on Grouvee now to where that would strengthen our interactivity on the site.
Example: I want to comment on a friends’ recent completion - “Hey! How’d you like it?” etc etc
Do you mean commenting when people add a game to their shelf? I’ve thought about putting that in for a while actually.
Here’s what I mean. I’m looking at my feed when I log in, and I see all the cool recent activity my friends are doing. Here’s a screen of my feed:
I’d like the ability to “like” or “comment” on each block of activity. Now that nicodemus has rated Unchartered 4/5 stars, I want to hop in, like it, and comment, saying something like, “Nice! How was it? Why 4 and not 5?” or something like that.
The heart of Grouvee is social connection and tracking games. Take a look at GoodReads.com, a social site for tracking books and not games:
GoodReads gives the option to interact with what my friends are doing. If I want to like or leave a comment, I can do that and hop on and start a conversation about the book. This will take away interaction from the clunky forums. The forums are important for longer discussions, but the comment thread could give users some interactions in their gaming circles.
yes. i agree. this is maybe the main social feature i find myself wanting. i see someone do some activity and i sometimes want to say ‘yes, thats a good one. enjoy’ or something like the other day @peter i was going to say ‘yes, you would probably like Stasis’ but there isnt a vehicle for that sort of thing really.
the problem of course is that this can make things too noisey. so if stuff like this happens there might be need of filters. currenltly site is in a sweet spot where there is no need for a filter. i also wish i could rate stuff without it hitting the main page. If i am just sorting my own stuff and dont want that to show up for a game i just didnt happen to rate as i’m doing some house cleaning would be nice to have it not show up.
That’s not a bad idea. I’ll add that to the list of stuff to do too. I know it’s not what you asked for, but I need to give people the ability to create private profiles too.
Even a “friends only” activity might be a decent idea.
I’m curious, but doesn’t the friends vs everyone filter on the main page take care of that? It filters out everything that isn’t posted by your friends. That deals with clutter, no?
I mean if people didn’t want everyone to be able to see the activity. They could mark it as friends only.
How are any updates coming along?
Also, I recently have gotten into https://letterboxd.com/. It’s great for ideas, and it’s pretty much what I want out of grouvee.
I still want to do this feature. The most recent thing I’m working on currently is the ability to add releases to your shelves. I have the mechanics in place to let people add specific releases of a game to their shelves, I just have to finish up with the display work.
I like the look of letterboxd. I’ve never been in love with their feature set, but I hear a lot of people say the like it. I know this is a vague question, but what do you wish that Grouvee did that letterboxd currently does?
Letterboxd streamlines person to person, social communication between friends and strangers through reviews, interactions, friend feed, etc. I’ve been on LetterBoxd for only 2 weeks now or so - and through writing reviews, rating movies, updating my feed, etc, I have connected with about a dozen strangers. It’s cool.
Grouvee feels quite “clunky” to me in the social dynamic. I’d like to see a friends feed that is interactive. i.e. I can comment, like, interact with my friends reviews/ratings/updates.
It’s funny, this comes up once in a while. I’m of the opposite mind. I’ve used both sites for some time now and I find Grouvee to be a far friendlier place than Letterboxd. I also find it much easier to have a conversation here on Grouvee. The thread on the main site is a great way to interact with, and get to know people. Additionally, the Grouvee forum hosts several excellent threads and discussions. On Letterboxed I find everything far more isolating. While their activity feed shows me the status updates of friends, I find that you see little else unless you navigate to specific film pages or lists. Here on Grouvee the conversations take place in what is akin to a central hub. My experience has been that Grouvee is the easier community to participate in.
That’s not to dismiss your preferences and request, it’s just interesting to note how differently we all perceive the pros and cons of the two sites.
I think I understand what you mean. The “friends” version of your feed isn’t terribly useful right now, and I mostly know why. In theory, the “friends” version of the feed should be the default one, and not the “all” version. I think some people don’t do statuses or reviews because they know it’s going to go into the firehose for everyone to see. They might just want their friends to see it. I don’t know.
I want to fix up the social stuff soon. When I get time to develop, my main focus has been to work on the data aspects of the site.
Thanks for the input!
Would it be possible to tag updates as for friends only? Right now you can tag a post as private. I could see the implementation of a a similar option for “friends only” working. That way it hides the message in the public stream but leaves it visible for active friends (I say knowing full well that’s probably a lot of work, lol).
Great discussions all around, all.
bmo, I think your points are well heard and defended. I actually am pleasantly surprised when I see how many strangers comment and interact with my reviews on games. I think that is actually one of Grouvee’s strengths, and I stand corrected!
That being said, what Peter is getting at is definitely a desire of mine. Looking at what my friends are doing, and then interacting with them. There’s a group of us at the office that all decided to register for Grouvee and keep it updated, but all updates we give one another are in person – not seen through Grouvee!
And I hate to be the guy sitting here and complaining about a lack of features – let me know how I can help, and know that I love Grouvee!
you weren’t asking me, but i feel same way. letterboxd is a pretty nicely designed machine. i’ve actually thought about this time to time when it’s come up (people do bring it up) but didnt say anything i dont think. First, i dont think letterboxd could be directly copied and shouldnt (some stuff wouldnt transalte/work for games imo, but it works perfect for letterboxd) grouvee also works differently anyway. That being said, there are some things on letterboxd that are kind of neat and could be adopted maybe (if someone were willing to do the work)
one thing that is nice on that site that grouvee could emulate is a calandar type roll of ‘year in review’ it has calandar dates marked with what was watched, and iirc you can mouse over your calandar dates and see pop up previews of the review you wrote… I’d love to see grouvee do that at some point and see statuss (or reviews). its just an easy way to see what was played throughout 1 year window. that kinda data could be expressed visually in different ways and grouvee could definitely work with the idea of it, maybe even do other things, like timeline generation that is shelf based with the option to print reviews or statuses (or both) during specified time intervals? :D. the fact we have a shelf type hierarchy is pretty cool and useful. Really POWERFUL a whole lotta visualization stuff could be done with it. (stuff not on letterboxd)
back to social: i have met people on letterboxd who have similiar tastes in b movies, etc. the fact there are lots of users on it and they are littering stuff all over makes them easy to find, so its helpful for content discovery grouvee is pretty good for content discovery but not in the same ways. Grouvee is small, so there arent endless users feeding the site with stuff to trawl over. Also working of the GB database, and seeing new things coming out, linked to developers, or perusing the tag cloud of a random game provides a really convenient way to find stuff to add to the wishlish. I have to say, (for me) Grouvee is the best tool ever to discover games. I think that even with small user base, the users could be goaded into providing these kind of content discovery needs.
Someone mentioned it somewhere, but we def need to have some kind of native top 10/favorite game shelf infra. and i think everyone would want that and to be able to have that on their page in some prominent display manner (prefferably with snazzy box art)… but what if say, you had the game show up on the users page, but you also that user show up on the game page for it as well? that way, people like me who like a game might see 5-10 people who have marked that game as a top game when i were to browse the shin megami tensei page, and i could go through their pages and see what else they like. I think that would be very very useful! and it could be shoehorned into a social dynamic that simulateously feeds content discovery.
game pages would be nice to interact and find statuses too. The main page/feed works fine as it is, but if i were to roll over a button and see statuses on game pages of games i like, etc and see recent statuses/posts etc, that’d be cool!.I can live without the ‘like’ feature, but it’s a nice way to let someone know you read what they wrote about something.
This is minor (but it’s something i definitely have noticed and will mention) but It makes me wonder who is playing what game. When it says on a game page 1 user is playing Faxandu (something not new, obscure) , i am curious who it is. If it’s really being played or they are inactive. Likewise, I am a bit curious about the 28 users who have ‘backlogged’ Pac Man! XD… Would it be a big privacy concenr for registered users to see stuff like this? Also, I’m sure everyone wonders about who rates games 5 stars that haven’t come out yet… 
I thought I’d just say that this is very much the case for me. As I am doing the solution to a game diary that bmo suggested, I end up marking them as private as it would fill up the front page feed otherwise (well, not exactly fill up, but in the current state, notes I take on games for myself doesn’t really fit as a “public” status update). However, if I had a way of making them friends only instead of private, I would do that.
I would also like this feature implemented on the site, but I actually don’t know how to add friends…
On the main site click on the name of the person you want to add and click add to friends it should be under their profile picture. If you need to find a user visit the user search page here and search for the user you want. Then click their name and add.
