Morning gripe

[robotech_master]

What is it with people using a system in ways it was not intended, and then griping at you when you make a use of it based on that in the way it was intended?

Amazon's wish list system was intended for you to make a list of things you wanted people to buy you. Then you could either tell them about it, or else someone could search on it, find your wish list by your personal information, and surprise you.

So, all of a sudden, as I'm buying Christmas gifts this year, I'm finding people making all sorts of oddball uses of the list function, and saying they don't want people to buy them things off of it. One of them says he uses it as a way to keep track of prices of a bunch of items all on one page. One of them says it's for family use only. How was I supposed to know that? Ask him? The whole point of a wish list is you're not supposed to have to ask, it lets you surprise them with something they wanted. There wasn't even anything in the "Unique Information" field to say "Please don't buy me anything off of this, thanks!"

If someone's going to make a nonstandard use of a standard public function like that, they should find some ways of telling other people about it right there on the page (like putting it in the "Unique Information" field). The onus shouldn't have to be on the other person to figure out psychically that they're not using it in the way it was intended.

Comments

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that seems pretty annoying to me too.

Don't worry, if you want to buy anything off of my Amazon list, I promise not to gripe. :)

-john

[artmomz.livejournal.com]

There is the option for them to mark their list as private and/or non-searchable! If that is how they intended to use it, then that's what they should have done!

Response

[jonrober.livejournal.com]

Er, well... what is it with people who are just given what's meant as a private, polite request for the future, don't say that it's frustrating or annoying them, and then publically talk about how badly it annoys them? :)

Seriously, that's all it was -- a polite request for the future, an explanation of why (I can't rely on my mother to necessarily order from Amazon, so it's possible that if someone orders X from Amazon, she'll at the same time be grabbing it from the local bookstore), and that's it. If, you know, that annoyed you then I'm sorry, but please tell me to my face. Or if you have to complain about me to someone else to blow steam and don't want to talk about it to me, fair enough. I just don't think a public forum where I'll then see the steam-blowing anyway is quite the best place, in that latter case.

And for the general record as it's been brought public... A friend in common had set up his own wishlist, which made me go "oops" as they were then discussed a bit, and so I set mine to not searchable JIC. Apparently between the friend's mention and me setting mine not searchable, robotech_master searched for my list. Oops, happens. No problem now as it was fixed before I found out that he'd even sent me, and I just thought I'd like to give him a head's up, especially since the conversation started because I don't bother to keep that list's mail address current. Since it was for family, it could either be shooting to their house for Christmas, or to my address for birthday (the two addresses some 1300 miles apart). Never seemed worth paying attention to since they'd put in manually where they wanted it to go each time, and so it went to an old MBE box that I only check twice a month. I was finally asked if I'd gotten it yet, then after finding out, asked him to not use that list again, not being sure if he'd looked at it before I set it not searchable or if I'd missed some way he'd have found it anyway. End of story.. or so I thought.

Set ramble off.

Fixed now

[(Anonymous)]

I set mine up originally because I was looking for a better way of managing a long-term shopping cart, since the cart system on Amazon doesn't let you buy only a portion of your cart. The wishlist thing seemed to do what I want, so I set it up without thinking about it a lot. I looked at the time for some way to make it private and couldn't find one; either I missed it or they added that later.

I figured anyone I knew would ask me first or see if I mentioned it before searching for a wishlist since that's what I'd do; you thought it would be better to surprise people since that's what you'd want other people to do for you. Oops. *heh*. Both of those viewpoints are well-represented in the general population, and certainly neither of them are wrong.

Anyway, it's marked private now so as not to confuse people, particularly since it's frequently out of date as I buy things from it from other sites and then don't get back to update it for a while.

eagle (http://journals.eyrie.org/eagle/)