2005 March

We’ve added a global search feature to Wists. The search will look up users, tags and individual item titles and descriptions all at once – returning the results for each, separately. – So there are no parameters and advanced search settings. Again the rule is: have the user do the least work. Because tags tend to have multiple variants with the same stem, e.g. Lifehacker, Lifehacks, Lifehacking, Wists search will return everything starting with ‘Lifehack’. However, because people have tagged things separately you can still filter by one tag in particular. I can see that perhaps using search and tags with extensions to common word stems might evolve some interesting patterns. For example, if I wanted to start a list of restaurants for my friends I coud tag as ‘restaurant_dgfriends’ and filter by that in a search for restaurant. I’ll have to think about it – but the next step…

New Features: (The overall aim is to make as much as possible one or two clicks or automatic, based upon normal interaction with the product, from building a network of friends and groups of tags, to publishing – as things like tags fill up we’ll overlay tag management on top – again hopefully making that as automated as possible.)